Scholarly Expertise: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Jay Augsburger
Hello! I’m the medical director for the Long Term Civil Commitment Units at the Center for Behavioral Health and Learning. This is a new program as of July 2024 and I am excited to help get it off the ground. I completed my medical school training at the University of Cincinnati, then residency at Oregon Health & Science University, then addiction psychiatry fellowship at UW, then worked at the Puget Sound VA for five years and Providence Swedish for six years prior to starting at UW. I’m thrilled to be part of the team here and looking forward to this next chapter in my career.
Tessa Frohe
I am a trained Behavioral Psychologist with a PhD in Health & Human Performance. The main goal of my work is to reduce substance-related harms and improve quality of life for people experiencing problems related to their substance use. I work closely with community members who use drugs to inform my line of research and address key needs identified. My primary appointment is at the Harm Reduction Research and Treatment (HaRRT) Center within the UW School of Medicine and hold an Affiliate Faculty appointment within the School of Public Health. My aim is to adapt, refine, and disseminate harm reduction programs through digital health interventions to empower individuals and ameliorate substance-related harms.
Jonathan W. Reeves
I am an Acting Assistant Professor and licensed clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. I received my Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and completed by postdoctoral training at the University of Washington. I am also a consultant for multiple teaching and implementation projects aimed helping community mental health providers deliver effective evidence-based trauma-informed care.
My career goal is to help survivors of complex trauma learn to thrive. My research and clinical work explores how mobile technology, principles of evidence-based practice, and our sociocultural context can be used to help survivors of trauma and their communities recover faster. My work specifically emphasizes recovery from complex racial trauma and other forms of identity-based trauma.
Koriann Cox
Koriann Cox, Ph.D. graduated from Northeastern University and is licensed in the state of Washington. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in co-occurring addiction and mental health and has a range of clinical experience with a variety of concerns including depression, anxiety, trauma, reproductive mental health, and substance and behavioral addictions. Dr. Cox’s strengths-focused approach emphasizes the mutual development of goals for therapy and ongoing collaboration between herself, the patient, and the care team. Dr. Cox uses a number of therapeutic modalities including but not limited to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Cognitive Processing Therapy.
Jessica A. Blayney
Dr. Blayney’s research aims to understand the risks for and consequences of sexual victimization. More specifically, this work centers around how social contexts influence sexual victimization risk as well as variation in post-victimization recovery, such as posttraumatic stress disorder, alcohol use, and sexual risk behaviors.
Charles C. Engel
Dr. Charles Engel is Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Core VA HSR Investigator in the Seattle Center for Innovation, Co-Director of the Center’s Advanced Fellowship on Health Systems Research, and Adjunct Physician Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation. Engel’s work focuses on trauma-informed health systems and strategies for improving the quality of primary care for chronic mental and physical health conditions. His research has covered traumatic injury and post-trauma syndromes ranging from blast injury, mild traumatic brain injury and Gulf War syndrome to PTSD and depression. Engel is experienced at mixed qualitative and quantitative methods and has led large pragmatic randomized trials, program evaluations, and implementation science studies. He has authored or coauthored nearly 200 scholarly papers, including in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and the American Journal of Psychiatry. Funding for his work has come from the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense and other organizations. Before joining UW Psychiatry and the AIMS Center in 2021, Dr. Engel was Senior Physician Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation from 2013 to 2020 and Associate Chair (Research) at Uniformed Services University’s Department of Psychiatry from 2001-2013. Engel has served on the board of directors of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, has testified twice before Congress, received a number of awards, and delivered invited lectures in over 10 countries. He received both his MD and MPH from the University of Washington.
David D. Luxton
My primary areas of research include artificial intelligence, AI/machine ethics, behavioral health technologies, telemedicine, telehealth, forensic psychology, and military and Veteran population health. I’ve consulted widely on the topic of military and veteran health and technology in healthcare and have helped to develop national guidelines for telemental health, clinical best practices for technology-based treatments, and standards for human-AI interaction transparency. My vision is to build, and help others to build, technologies that help promote behavioral change and that improve the lives of people.
Anna Jaffe
Dr. Jaffe’s research is focused on responding to the public health problem of sexual assault and co-occurring alcohol misuse by improving understanding of survivors’ experiences and promoting recovery through novel interventions.
Taking an ecological perspective, Dr. Jaffe considers individual factors (e.g., cognitions, stress response), microsystems (e.g., interpersonal interactions, social networks), macrosystems (e.g., societal norms), and chronosystems (e.g., changes over time) that affect survivors’ recovery after sexual assault. Across these systems, she seeks to design and improve clinical interventions that support survivors’ recovery, mitigate post-assault alcohol misuse, and reduce distress.
Sarah Campbell
My research broadly seeks to understand the ways in which our social and romantic relationships intersect with physical and mental health. Additionally, I work in treatment development and evaluation with the aim of improving and harnessing social relationships to increase physical and mental wellbeing. I was recently funded by a 5-year Career Development Award through VA HSR&D. This award aims to both improve clinicians’ measurement of social relationships in the context of mental health care and modify and test brief, Primary Care-based interventions for PTSD and social support. In this line of research, I am PI of an HSR&D and VAPS R&D-funded nationwide survey of veterans both with and without PTSD that seeks to collect psychometric and acceptability data on social support instruments for future use in measurement-based care. I am also collaborating with colleagues in HSR&D to develop and test a dyadic intervention for improving health behavior. I am lucky to provide clinical care as a staff psychologist in the PTSD Outpatient Clinic at VA Puget Sound, where I deliver individual, group, and couples treatments for PTSD and provide psychoeducation on trauma and related conditions to loved ones of veterans with PTSD.
