By Oeishi Banerjee and Madeleine Fuselier

Christina Lacerenza is a CORE Lab alumna who graduated with her PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology last year (2017). She has since moved to Colorado to continue to pursue her research. Christina is now working as the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder, and she looks forward to becoming an Assistant Professor next year. Her research focuses on developing diverse leaders and teams and identifying unconventional, yet effective, leadership practices.

Christina came to the CORE Lab with a general interest in teams, and it was here that she further developed a more specific interest in leaders, particularly in increasing the presence of shared leadership practices and minority leaders. Christina credits the CORE Lab with helping her to hone many of the skills she uses in her work now, including the ability to take ownership and manage large research projects.

Christina says, “I was exposed to a lot of experiences throughout my time at CORE.” One of the projects she worked on was the CORE Lab’s NASA Roles project, identifying which roles are most important for space exploration teams. She says, “Working with NASA was very interesting.” She found it especially rewarding “knowing that the research that [they were] doing would have an impact on a future Mars mission.”

Christina’s dissertation examined “the predictive validity of deep- and surface-level leader traits.” She collaborated with the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) here at Rice to look at which personality traits were predictive of which people ultimately emerge as leaders within self-managed teams in order to be able to develop future leaders accordingly. Her master’s thesis was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. As the recipient of the 2017 Leslie W. Joyce and Paul W. Thayer Graduate Fellowship in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Christina won a $10,000 grant for her work.

Offering advice to aspiring researchers, Christina says, “Figure out what your passion is and make sure that you’re aligning that with your career goals.” Christina’s passion has clearly guided her own career. She says that it was her love for research which led her to continue on to grad school after college. Her hard work and careful evaluation of how to make her goals a reality have led her to her dream job. She continues to study leadership and teamwork, driven by her passion for making the world a more equitable place for future generations.