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A final-year graduate student of psychology, Stela Lara Tenšek participated this autumn, through the Med&X Accelerator program, in a research visit to the Yale Child Study Center and the Creativity and Emotions Lab at the Center for Emotional Intelligence, Yale School of Medicine, Yale University.
The collaboration began within the Med&X Accelerator call (https://www.medx.hr/accelerator
), which provides final-year medical and psychology students with a unique professional experience at world-renowned institutions such as the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Columbia University, and the University of Zurich. In 2025, Yale University opened its doors to this program for the first time, thereby enabling—also for the first time—the participation of a psychology student from Croatia.
Following two rounds of selection and interviews with international experts, Tenšek was selected and awarded the opportunity to develop a distinctive professional and research experience through international scientific collaboration with the renowned scientist and psychologist Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Ph.D., Director of the Creativity and Emotions Lab (https://medicine.yale.edu/profile/zorana-ivcevic/
). As part of this collaboration, Stela is conducting research within the three-year project Mirror to the World, which aims to investigate the artistic process and the experience of art.
During her study visit, she also participated in two major conferences. The first was the 8th Annual Designing for Empathy Summit, held at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York and organized by ONE – Organisation of Networks for Empathy (https://oneempathynetwork.com/
). The conference featured the innovative exhibition Dress, Dreams and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis (https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum/exhibitions/dress-dreams-desire/index.php
). The second conference, the RULER Implementation Conference, was held at Yale University in New Haven and focused on the importance of emotional regulation within educational systems (https://conference.rulerapproach.org/
).
In addition to conference participation and research work, during her stay at Yale University Stela attended courses at the Department of Psychology, took part in weekly discussions on current research conducted by Yale scholars and their collaborators, and visited Yale museums, where she participated in the testing of psychological instruments currently under development. During her stay, she developed a range of key academic and research skills, including active involvement in the creation and revision of items for new psychometric instruments, the design of questions for semi-structured interviews, and the conduct of qualitative interviews. She also gained experience in testing instruments still in development, as well as working with specialized platforms for designing and administering online surveys. She particularly highlights her progress in participating in constructive academic discussions and in the interpretation and critical analysis of research results.
She is especially pleased to note that her collaboration with Yale continues through joint research activities, with plans to present results at international conferences. She looks forward to applying and disseminating the knowledge, methods, and tools she has acquired in her future academic and professional work.
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