December

3rd, 2015

To Whom It May Concern:

I am thrilled to recommend Ms. Julie Loh for your graduate program. I have been
involved in psychological research in areas of behavioral science, with a focus in
clinical, family, child, and developmental areas for over 8 years. I am currently a
doctoral candidate in the child clinical psychology department at University of
Washington, and currently a research coordinator working with Dr. Lynn Fainsilber
Katz studying family adjustment in various contexts of adversity. I have also been a
teaching assistant at the University of Washington for over a year, and in my
experiences Julie stands out as one of the brightest young scholars I have had the
pleasure of having in class and working with in a research lab. She has consistently
demonstrated her commitment and passion for learning and applying strong
research skills that can enhance health care services for people. I believe she is
uniquely qualified to pursue this academic opportunity because of her ability to
bring enthusiasm, hard work, critical thought, conscientiousness, and a positive
attitude to her academic and research pursuits. In addition, I believe she is on a path
to a great career and I believe this program would greatly enrich her education and
significantly impact the quality of her professional scientific pursuits in the future.

I first met Ms. Loh in the Summer of 2013, when I was a Teaching Assistant for a
summer version of a course in Research Methods in Psychology. The course is
already one of the most difficult required courses for the psychology undergraduate
major, and on top of this the summer term of the course requires students to learn
and perform at an even faster pace given the shortened and more concentrated
timeline. The course required students to not only learn basic principles related to a
wide array of methodologies employed in classic and contemporary psychological
research, but also to demonstrate competence in navigating research resources,
using discipline based style formats, interpreting and translating qualitative and
quantitative research results, and demonstrating critical thinking in discussions and
writing. Ms. Loh excelled on assignments, discussions, and exams, and contributed
greatly to a classroom atmosphere of genuine curiosity and interest in this topic. She
also took initiative to speak with myself and the lecture professor outside of class
time regarding her own short and long term research interests which was quite
outstanding.

I advertised for an open position in our research lab towards the end of the summer
quarter. Ms. Loh expressed great interest in the position, and was also extremely
qualified so our lab was very excited to bring her on board to work with us. A short

time after joining our lab, Julie had already demonstrated exceptional skill and
mastery at complicated tasks like screening and processing electrocardiogram
(ECG) data from interactions with families from a domestic violence study as well as
a pediatric cancer study. This work required her to visually inspect and edit heart
inter-beat interval data using custom MatLab software programs as well as
MindWare software to reduce this raw data into interpretable and quantifiable
segments. She has also greatly helped with data management and entry across a
wide range of psychological and related measures in our research work. In addition,
she has been engaged in bi-weekly readings of related (and often advanced) current
psychological research literature, and enthusiastically contributed to critical
discussions we have had on topics such as stress reactivity, exposure to
violence/victimization and development, polyvagal theory, pediatric cancer, and
advanced statistical analysis in social science.

More recently, Ms. Loh has been closely involved in a newer study in our lab that is
testing the efficacy of an emotion coaching enhanced parent training intervention
for parents and children with low prosocial emotions. We are also examining the
treatment and research feasibility of such an intervention conducted in the
community in Seattle, in partnership with several local mental health service
provider agencies. She has been closely involved in helping us refine and pilot our
research procedures with families and children. In addition, Julie has lead the data
management aspects of this new study by developing and testing spreadsheets that
we require for effective data management. In addition, she has been incredibly
helpful in helping with gathering, compiling, and organizing references used on
several important grant submissions in our lab in the area of pediatric cancer and
family functioning. Throughout all of this work Julie has shown that she is an
exceptionally dedicated hard worker with a conscientious attention to detail. Her
mature communication skills and the excited and positive attitude that she brings to
all of her work is also very admirable.

Ms. Loh has shown great initiative in seeking out research opportunities to further
her knowledge and experience in research. Last year she applied and was
successfully accepted for a summer long internship in Taiwan studying ovarian
cancer. During the internship Ms. Loh successfully learned and practiced new lab
research procedures (MTT assay, DNA fragmentation, wound healing tests, among
others) related to the study of a specific sub-type of cancer cell. The internship
concluded with her presenting a synthesized summary of her work at an academic
conference. Moreover, Ms. Loh received most of this summer instruction in Chinese,
and upon her return spoke excitedly about all the inspiring mentors and peers she
had a chance to interact with that summer.

Last summer Ms. Loh worked as a teaching assistant for a microbiology course for
the Robinson Center Summer Stretch Program. The course was taught by Laura
Austin, Ph.D and Alyse Douglas. During this month long course Julie had
responsibilities of grading, assisting with lab, and answering student questions

regarding the course material. She also had an opportunity to teach an hour long
lecture on HIV and AIDS to the students during the Immunology unit of the course.

Thus, it is with great enthusiasm that I recommend Ms. Loh for your masters
graduate program. From my time of working with her, I am confident that she will
bring not only her fantastic intelligence, curiosity, and hard working spirit, but also
that she will likely connect with others in positive ways and make the most of
academic and other unique experiences that come her way. She is an extremely
bright, intelligent, compassionate, and motivated scholar who I believe would be a
pleasure to have in your program.


Sincerely,

Kyrill Gurtovenko, M.S.
University of Washington
gurtoven@uw.edu