I am a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and I work as the Deputy Associate Chief of Staff for Mental Health at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System. I am a licensed clinical psychologist. My research is focused on studying mental health technologies to support Veterans, Service Members, their families, and the health care staff that treat them. I research mobile applications, virtual reality, virtual standardized patients, and other innovative approaches to improve mental health education and services. I have conducted DoD and VA funded research and focus on applied interventions that may have promise to make a difference in the lives of those we serve. I am an Army Veteran and current behavioral health officer in the Washington State Army National Guard.
Personal Statement
I came to the University of Washington in 2014 as a postdoctoral fellow supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and has been faculty here since 2016. My research interests include examination of cognitive and psychosocial processes thought to underlie substance misuse predominantly among adolescents and young adults. Support for my work has been provided by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and by the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute at the University of Washington.
Personal Statement
My clinical service and research focuses on the interaction of mental and physical illness, especially in patients with chronic pain. Much of my research in recent decades has focused on the risks of treating chronic pain with opioids. I have developed educational programs and outcome tracking tools to assist with opioid treatment of chronic pain. I have published a book about patient empowerment in chronic disease care, The Patient as Agent of Health and Health Care (Oxford, 2017). I have another book written with Jane Ballantyne forthcoming, The Right to Pain Relief and other deep roots of the opioid epidemic (Oxford, 2022).
I am board certified in General Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Washington. I am an attending physician on the Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine Unit at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where I provide acute inpatient treatment to patients with a broad range of diagnoses and presenting concerns.
I aim to provide high-quality, antiracist, trauma-informed evidence-based care as part of a multidisciplinary treatment team, while providing clinical supervision and education to CAP fellows, General Psychiatry Residents, and Medical Students. I am involved in didactic education for the CAP fellows as the course director for Forensics, Ethics, and Professionalism (FEP), and for the medical students as the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry clerkship director for third year medical students. In addition, I am the EDI training director for the CAP fellowship program.
Personal Statement
I am interested in methods of evidence translation and knowledge exchange that improve system and policymaking in behavioral health with a focal interest in public mental health for children and juvenile justice system reform.
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.
Personal Statement
My career goal is to give suicidal clients and their clinicians the best chance to succeed. I have been working in the area of health services, treatment development, and clinical trials research to prevent suicide for over 20 years. My graduate training was in community/clinical psychology and focused on achieving clinical ends through prevention and other systemic interventions in socio-culturally diverse populations. I have brought these perspectives into health services research. I have developed or adapted interventions to improve care and clinician willingness to work with suicidal patients including Caring Contacts, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS), and Preventing Addiction Related Suicide (PARS). I have developed an adaptation of DBT, Accepting the Challenges of Employment and Self-Sufficiency (DBT-ACES), a program to assist psychiatrically disabled individuals find and maintain living wage employment. My research has been funded by NIMH, NIDA, the Department of Defense, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the Department of Veteran Health Affairs, and the State of Washington.
I am the director of the Center for Suicide Prevention and Recovery (CSPAR) whose mission is to promote the recovery of suicidal individuals and the effectiveness and well-being the clinicians and families who care for them by conducting rigorous and ecologically valid research, developing innovative interventions, improving policies, systems and environments of care, and providing expert training and consultation. CSPAR faculty and staff seek a deep understanding of the cultures and settings in which we work that leads to meaningful and effective interventions ready for implementation.
In addition to clinical research, I founded the Society for Implementation Research Collaboration (SIRC) and am the PI and Director of the Military Suicide Research Consortium Dissemination and Implementation core. These organizations focus on disseminating and implementing innovative, evidence-based interventions in the systems that need them. Beyond my research, I directed the Harborview Dialectical Behavior Therapy program at Harborview Medical Center 1996-2019, co-lead the UW DBT Training Program and have a long history of training and mentoring junior faculty, fellows, psychiatry residents, pre-doctoral psychology interns, undergraduate students, and post-baccalaureate trainees. I provide psychotherapy and consultation at the UWMC Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic.
Personal Statement
I am a psychiatrist at the UW Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic (OPC) on Roosevelt, where I see patients for consultation, medication management, and psychotherapy, both individually and with psychiatry residents. I see patients with mood disorders, anxiety disorders, trauma, and complex trauma. I also help answer a consultation line for providers in the state of Washington who have questions about psychiatric medications during the perinatal period.
I serve as an Associate Program Director in the Psychiatry residency, where I help oversee the curriculum. My areas of interests are resident education, psychodynamic psychotherapy, outpatient psychiatry, perinatal psychiatry, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Personal Statement
I am the Chief of Psychology at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System and Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
I am a suicide prevention researcher and health services investigator who has served as the principal investigator for a variety of large federally-funded suicide prevention studies. My research focuses on Veteran and military suicide prevention. I am interested in risk and protective factors that are unique to the military community. My work focuses on systematic clinical and public health approaches to reducing suicide behaviors. I have had the opportunity to contribute to national initiatives to translate research into policy and best-practices, and I have been fortunate to have my work highlighted in interviews with numerous national TV, radio, and news outlets.
Personal Statement
I am clinical psychologist and a Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, and a clinical researcher specializing in ADHD throughout the lifespan. I direct the PEARL Clinic (Program to enhance attention, regulation, and learning) at Seattle Children’s. The PEARL Clinic is based on a multidisciplinary and collaborative care model which works closely with PCP’s who refer families to PEARL for evaluation and access to our behavioral group treatment programs and treatment recommendations. The PEARL clinic also provided multidisciplinary training for psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, family medicine physicians, and medical students. The majority of my clinical work involves diagnostic evaluations and consultations for the parents, referring physician, and schools.
My research emphasis is on personalizing ADHD treatment, and determining how best to combine and sequence interventions throughout the lifespan for individuals with ADHD. I have assisted in the development of several stimulant and non stimulant medications, and participated in many clinical trials. Currently, we are conducting a study for parents with ADHD who have young children with ADHD symptoms where we are treating the parent with medication and behavioral parent training or behavior parent training. I am also investigating the relationship between genetic factors and ADHD treatment response.
Other areas of interest include sleep problems and overlap with ADHD, and novel treatments such as Trigeminal Nerve Stimulation (TNS) and augmentation strategies such as mindfulness and physical exercise or activity level.
