I am a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Seattle Children’s Hospital and faculty member at the University of Washington Medicine. My SCH practice locations include the Gender Clinic (Adolescent Medicine), Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic, Autism Center, and the inpatient unit- Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine Unit (PBMU). I believe in delivering compassionate, evidence-based care in supporting patients and their families. My approach is both comprehensive and patient-centered, as it is important to consider the needs of the individual while also appreciating societal and cultural context. I specialize in working with diverse patient populations with various marginalized identities, such as those who identify as LGBTQ, gender diverse, and/or neurodiverse. I also work closely with the Adolescent Medicine Gender Clinic in supporting any mental health needs of transgender/gender diverse youth and their families. I also collaborate with colleagues in specialty medical clinics to coordinate care of medically complex patients. Additionally, I serve as a consultant with various school programs to support mental health initiatives and advocacy efforts.
Academically, I am involved with several initiatives both locally and nationally, particularly those that work to promote diversity and equity. I serve on committees supporting the SCH/UW CAP Fellowship Program, educating trainees and students through direct clinical supervision as well as with lectures and discussions. On a national level, I serve on the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Issues Committee (SOGIIC) for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP). My clinical research focuses on finding strategies to better support the mental health and well-being of patients and families who are LGBTQ+. Additionally, I work on studies that explore the intersection between gender diversity and neuro diversity/autism spectrum.
I am interested in assessing risky alcohol and substance use and related consequences in young adults, with a specific focus on impaired driving-related behaviors. My work has mostly utilized a behavioral decision-making approach to understand factors that influence young adults’ decisions to engage in risky behaviors. I am also interested in developing and adapting prevention and intervention programs to reduce alcohol and substance use and consequences.
Personal Statement
The transition to adulthood is the developmental period when alcohol use, marijuana use, and their associated consequences reach their lifetime peak. My scholarly interests focus on the etiology and prevention of substance use behaviors and consequences during adolescence and young/early adulthood. I have developed a highly successful portfolio of work bridging developmental, social, and motivational theory with applied prevention and intervention techniques to strategically address high-risk behaviors during the transition to adulthood.
My research addresses important questions regarding how recent marijuana legislation in Washington State impacts young adult marijuana use and consequences; what motivates young adults to engage in alcohol and marijuana use; how alcohol expectancies, alcohol use and consequences are linked in a natural feed-forward process that maintains high-risk behaviors; how developmental transitions and event timing influence use; and what are efficacious prevention and intervention strategies and for whom and under what conditions are these most effective.
Personal Statement
I am interested in mood and anxiety disorders and the intersection of these with chronic medical illnesses. My approach to treatment is integrative. Working within a cognitive-behavioral framework, I use many traditional CBT methods, including hypnosis, mindfulness training, and concepts from third-generation cognitive and behavioral methods.
Personal Statement
My research focuses on understanding and addressing the contextual factors like social support and policy that affect health and health behavior. I completed a VA Health Systems Research (HSR) Career Development Award focused on developing a behavioral weight management program for Veterans with PTSD called MOVE!+UP (2015-2020). We are currently testing MOVE!+UP in a VA HSR Merit-funded study using a hybrid effectiveness and implementation RCT design. I recently led another VA HSR Merit-funded study as Principal Investigator (PI) to test a self-directed behavioral weight management intervention among 500 Veterans with obesity; the findings were published in JAMA: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2799407. I am Co-PI for two additional VA HSR Merit-funded studies, both RCTs testing behavioral interventions that harness the power of social support. Last, I am Co-PI for a VA operations-funded project called MOVED By LOVE, a multi-method study that is partnering with Black Veterans to enhance how weight management care in VA serves Black Veterans. The first findings from the study were recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-024-08628-7. I am fortunate to work with Veterans with PTSD as a staff psychologist in the VA Puget Sound-Seattle PTSD Outpatient Clinic. Lastly, I have an interest in maximizing research impact by communicating about science with Veterans, the public, institutions, and policymakers.
Personal Statement
I am a clinical psychologist with research interests in the treatment of alcohol and substance use disorders and co-occurring mental health conditions.
My research focuses on understanding how to improve access to evidence-based treatments and understanding why and how patients benefit from treatment. I am particularly interested in research measurement-based care — i.e., the use of standardized measures to monitor treatment progress and inform clinical decision-making.
Broad areas of interest include:
- Alcohol and drug use disorder treatment, including the effectiveness of digital and behavioral interventions, mechanisms of behavioral change, and social and environmental determinants of change.
- Technology to support behavioral change, including patient- and clinician-facing tools that support clinical decision-making, treatment adherence, and treatment progress monitoring.
- Applied statistical analysis, including methods for analyzing longitudinal data, clinical trials data, multilevel data, missing data, psychometric analysis, and data visualization.
As a board-certified clinical health psychologist, I have primarily focused my clinical work on preventive medicine with special expertise in diabetes, weight management, and tobacco use cessation. I train clinicians in motivational interviewing and health coaching, and am currently a co-investigator on a research study examining an intervention with peer health coaches in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). After nearly two decades of working in complex healthcare settings, like the VHA and serving in several leadership roles within and external to the VHA, I have grown a passion for supporting those who serve others and improving workplace well-being. I am an Associate Certified Coach and am enrolled in a Masters program in Leadership and Organizational Development. I coach leaders and individual contributors on their professional and personal goals, help teams work better together, engage clinics in identifying and implementing meaningful changes to improve workplace satisfaction.
Personal Statement
I am a board certified psychiatrist and work at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. I am a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. I obtained a fellowship in consultation-liaison psychiatry, a specialty that focuses on providing psychiatric care for people with complex medical conditions. My primary clinical focus is people with cancer.
I love my work. Being ill is a vulnerable time and my goal is to ease suffering and provide a sense of connection and understanding for all I work with. I believe in working collaboratively with patients and families. We work together to identify what the goals of treatment are. I have expertise in diagnosis, psychopharmacology and psychotherapy and adapt my recommendations to best serve the goals of the person before me.
I am also passionate about education. I am the site director at Fred Hutch Cancer Center for our Psycho-oncology Fellowship Program. I supervise Cl fellows, addiction fellows, psychiatry residents and provide education to social workers and psychology trainees.
Personal Statement
I am a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. I received my MD from New York University and completed my adult residency at the Harvard Massachusetts General Hospital/McLean Hospital program where I was chief resident. I then went on to complete a fellowship in psychosomatic medicine at the University of Washington. I am currently on faculty at Harborview Medical Center on the inpatient psychiatry consult service.
I have a longstanding interest in the intersection between medicine and psychiatry, and am the author of numerous published articles on topics ranging from the neuropsychiatric effects of steroids to managing borderline personality disorder in the primary care setting. I have a particular interest in the use of electroconvulsive therapy, including in the treatment of catatonia. I am currently involved in research projects in conjunction with the division of nephrology and the neurosurgery department. In addition to my clinical and research interests, I am also an associate program director for the UW Adult Psychiatry Residency at Harborview Medical Center.
Personal Statement
Over the last 25 years, my work has focused on relationships between stress and health in several risk groups (spouse caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease, medical students, psychiatric/medical outpatients/inpatients, air traffic controllers, and camp counselors). We have developed and/or revised measures of medical student stress, caregiver burden, patient anger/dyscontrol, process coping, appraisal, neuropsychological function and physician awareness of patient problems. These measures have been used by university researchers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies in clinical trials, prisons, nursing homes/long term care, rehabilitation facilities, and public health organizations. These psychosocial and behavioral measures have been shown to predict and be predicted by physiological and cognitive measures. We have also focused on moderators of such relationships, such as gender, personality, and co-morbidities. We have used primarily multicohort long-term studies that allow for interactions between exposures to stressors, hard-wired vulnerabilities, and more temporal resources. We attempted to identify mechanisms that can be potentially altered to have long-term public health significance in persons under chronic stress. I have also attempted to isolate groups that are at high risk for negative outcomes. In a perfect world, interventions should be used to help all persons who have deleterious responses to stress, but society cannot afford this. For this reason, the identification of high risk groups is imperative for maximizing the effect of interventions.
My research program’s long range goal is to better understand the mechanisms by which chronic stress translates into physical, mental, or cognitive health problems. We are examining caregivers of spouses with AD and demographically-similar spouse non-caregivers across time and assessing the degree to which elevated depression, stress hormones, inflammation, and insulin resistance in caregivers predict cognitive decline in caregivers relative to non-caregivers. We are also attempting to replicate our earlier work that showed that chronic stress and chronic disease moderate each other’s physiological risks. For example, physiological dysregulation that is specific to a disease (e.g., metabolic syndrome with CHD, blood pressure reactivity with hypertension, and immune function with cancer history, HbA1c with diabetes) is exacerbated in caregivers with a chronic disease relative to non-caregivers with a chronic disease, but no such differences occur in caregivers versus non-caregivers without a chronic disease. Finally, we are examining a large cohort of older adults sampled from various U.S. communities in order to assess the influence of life stressors on long term cognitive function and potential mediators of such changes.
