Get To Know Me

While it would be nearly impossible to write an “About Me” paragraph that adequately covers my background and all of the topics that pique my interest, I’ll give it a shot. My name is Kalvin Garrah and I am currently a graduate student pursuing a PhD in Social Psychology. Broadly, my research focuses on nonverbal communication, though I am most interested in emotional expressions such as laughter.

How did I get here? Well, it’s been quite the journey.

I spent my high school years in pursuit of a career in music, particularly as a jazz trumpet player. I studied under incredible musicians and applied only to music conservatories for college. As I approached the end of my senior year, however, the realities of working gig-to-gig as a freelance musician began to set in. Ultimately, I decided it was not the path I truly wanted to take.

Instead, I pivoted to one of my budding interests: the study of law. With aspirations of becoming an attorney, I enrolled in community college as a pre-law criminal justice major. However, I quickly found myself far more interested in examining why people committed crimes – and the psychological dynamics of the courtroom – than the practice of law itself. I wanted to understand how cognitive processes, attitudes, beliefs, and other social psychological factors worked together to shape criminal behavior and decision-making in high-stakes legal contexts.

After transferring to the University of Baltimore to complete my bachelor’s degree, I made perhaps the most significant decision of my life: switching my major to psychology. I simultaneously completed a minor in philosophy, finding that applying philosophical and ethical principles to psychology sharpened my grasp of the many theories and frameworks offered by the field to make sense of our fundamentally social world. During my senior year at the University of Baltimore, I joined Dr. Sally Farley’s research lab and began assisting with various research projects all centered around nonverbal communication; to say I was instantaneously enamored with research would be an understatement. It sparked an unwavering passion within me that, up until then, I had felt only through jazz music – and that had eluded me for most of my undergraduate years.

I have now spent almost three years working in Dr. Farley’s lab – first as a research assistant, and more recently, as lab manager. In these roles, I have completed various research projects and co-authored several peer-reviewed journal articles. In the fall of 2026, I will be starting my PhD in Social Psychology; I plan to continue my current research investigating nonverbal signals of emotion, particularly laughter and other nonlinguistic vocalizations.