Who We Are

Teaching Philosophy

Clinically: I believe that teaching of psychiatry and psychology residents should meaningfully improve their clinical skill and judgment including respect for the patient’s strengths and perspective, treatment alliance, fund of knowledge, and engagement and commitment of patients to treatment. Even when psychiatrists do not conduct psychotherapy after graduation, they often supervise and direct those who do. I believe it is critical that they truly understand what psychotherapy is, how and when it works, and the strategies within it in order to guide the services they will supervise throughout their careers. Psychologists often come to training in our department with a large fund of knowledge and clinical experience, but frequently from limited settings with mild to moderate illness. I believe it is critical for psychologists to gain exposure and experience adapting evidence-based psychotherapies to more severe psychopathology and to patients in more difficult circumstances as well as within the limits of Medicaid and Medicare funding. Not only do they graduate as stronger and more flexible clinicians, they can be more effective as researchers and teachers as well.

Research: I believe health services and clinical trial researchers need to deeply understand not only the patients and their struggles, but also the clinicians and systems which struggle to serve them and the social and cultural contexts from which they come. In addition, researchers need to understand their own academic context, that of the funders and reviewers of their work, and what is critical to career and funding success. Smart, thoughtful researchers who cannot get their research funded leave important questions unstudied and interventions untried. This helps no one. Thus, I am committed to helping new researchers understand what they study, how to study it well, and how to fund their research so they can succeed and change the future of health services.

• Strengthening financial literacy for people living with serious mental illness
• Using Large Language Models to identify video platform interactions indicating suicide risk
• A pilot trial on EMA habit formation behavioral strategies for improving engagement of digital mindfulness interventions among non-suicidal self-injury engagers
• eHaRT-A: adapting an in-person harm reduction for alcohol intervention into a telehealth platform
• eHaRT-A
• Decreasing engagement and transmission of suicide-related content on TikTok
• Understanding the support needs of gender expansive youth
• Developing a resource toolkit for clinician survivors of suicide loss
• Consumer perspectives of online & in-person suicide prevention strategies
• Using technology to scale Caring Contacts and reduce suicide
• Preventing addiction related suicide
• Project WISE (Workplace Integrated Support & Education)
• SPARC suicide prevention

Recent Publications