David Atkins, PhD

David Atkins, PhD

Faculty Appointment(s)

Research Professor

datkins@uw.edu

206-616-3879

Personal Statement

​​”Can you recommend a good therapist?” Turns out, that is a very challenging question to answer. Whereas some medical fields have reasonable quality indicators (e.g., procedure complication rates, hospital readmissions), with psychotherapy it is very challenging to measure quality.

My research brings together psychotherapy experts with engineers and computer scientists to develop automated methods for evaluating and promoting high-quality counseling and therapy. To do this we rely on speech signal processing and machine learning methodologies and then present it to clinicians and patients using interactive visual summaries.

Education

PhD, Clinical Psychology , University of Washington , 1997-2003
MA, Psychology , Stanford University , 1994-1995
BA, Psychology , Stanford University , 1990-1994

Department Affiliations

Centers/Programs

Scholarly Expertise

Teaching Philosophy

 

 

My work focuses on technology-augmented psychotherapy and behavioral interventions, where we use machine learning and user-centered design to provide fast, objective, performance-based feedback to clinicians to assist training, supervision, and quality monitoring. More generally, I’m interested in data science applications in Psychiatry and assist colleagues in designing studies and analyzing data.

Recent Publications

Coregulation of therapist and client emotion during psychotherapy.
(2020 Jun)
Psychother Res 30(5): 591-603
Soma CS, Baucom BRW, Xiao B, Butner JE, Hilpert P, Narayanan S, Atkins DC, Imel ZE
Can a computer detect interpersonal skills? Using machine learning to scale up the Facilitative Interpersonal Skills task.
(2020 Mar 16)
Psychother Res
Goldberg SB, Tanana M, Imel ZE, Atkins DC, Hill CE, Anderson T
Sub-study Correction: Use of Human-Centered Design to Improve Implementation of Evidence-Based Psychotherapies in Low-Resource Communities: Protocol for Studies Applying a Framework to Assess Usability.
(2020 Mar 4)
JMIR Res Protoc 9(3): e18241
Lyon AR, Munson SA, Renn BN, Atkins DC, Pullmann MD, Friedman E, Areán PA
REPRINT OF: Current Methods of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force: A Review of the Process.
(2020 Mar)
Am J Prev Med 58(3): 316-331
Harris RP, Helfand M, Woolf SH, Lohr KN, Mulrow CD, Teutsch SM, Atkins D, Methods Work Group, Third U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.
The Structure of Competence: Evaluating the Factor Structure of the Cognitive Therapy Rating Scale.
(2020 Jan)
Behav Ther 51(1): 113-122
Goldberg SB, Baldwin SA, Merced K, Caperton DD, Imel ZE, Atkins DC, Creed T
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