Maria D. Guzman
	Title:	Senior Researcher
	Office:	Lewis Towers 1002B
	Phone:	312-915-8621
	E-mail:	mguzman@luc.edu

Personal Information

Maria D. Guzman is obtaining her Doctoral degree in Developmental Psychology from Loyola University Chicago. In her graduate career, she has presented at several conferences, including the Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois conference, the Society for Research on Adolescence conference, and the Cognitive Development Society conference. She worked with adolescents for seven years at Erie Neighborhood House since obtaining her Bachelor of Science degree in psychology from Loyola University Chicago in May of 2001.

Maria's research interests include adolescent extracurricular activity participation and its effects on all aspects of well-being, ethnic identity development in minority adolescents, and bilingual education. She has participated in several research projects ranging from children’s acquisition of language, in particular bilingual children's acquisition of the shape bias, to assessing the motives and mechanisms behind adolescent's participation in extracurricular activities. She has lead several evaluation projects, including an evaluation of participant satisfaction among youth participants at Erie Neighborhood House. Using the training she received from High/Scope, she has also evaluated the quality of certain youth programs in Chicago in an effort to try to account for the mechanism of the impact of youth program quality on positive psychological outcomes.