Dr. Tamara Allard is a Targeted Presidential Management Fellow serving as the Special Assistant to the NINDS Chief of Staff in the Immediate Office of the Director. She earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Maryland in the summer of 2023. In graduate school, Dr. Allard’s main research interest was understanding how lifestyle factors like sleep, stress, and exercise impact memory and brain development. Moreover, her dissertation primarily focused on characterizing longitudinal co-development of episodic memory and the cortex across early to middle childhood. Outside the lab, Tamara has been a student leader and education advocate, serving as the President of her Graduate Student Government and as the National Spokesperson for National Higher Education Day. Some of her proudest accomplishments in these roles include leading a social media campaign that reached 19 million people in 2022 and securing a commitment from her university administrators to build a new affordable graduate student housing complex that is now under construction.