Faculty
All full-time faculty members have a Ph.D., Psy.D., or Ed.D. in clinical, school, or another area of psychology. In addition to teaching, faculty members are actively involved in research and professional and community service. Numerous opportunities exist for student participation in faculty research and service.
Core Ph.D. Program Faculty
Motivational models of alcohol use/substance use. Application of intensive-longitudinal research designs in understanding the stress and coping process and health-related behavior (e.g., alcohol use).
Examining cognitive, psychophysiological, behavioral, and motivational aspects of emotions and affective psychopathology. Investigating comorbidities among mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Assessing mechanisms of change in evidence-based psychotherapies. Employing implicit measurement of affective states.
Refining assessment of borderline personality disorder; predicting suicide and self-harm in daily life; testing mobile interventions for suicidality and self-harm; exploring the overlap between psychological and physical pain; studying links between trauma, relationships, and personality disorders.
Development of psychosocial treatments for youth mood disorders and for vulnerable youth (children in foster care); Sleep disturbance and circadian rhythm dysfunction as precipitating and maintaining mechanisms in mood and anxiety disorders; Identification of biological markers of treatment response; Sleep health disparities in vulnerable youth (children in foster care and racial and ethnic minority populations).
Measurement and methodology; Positive psychology with an emphasis on the concept of character.
Integrating behavioral health services into pediatric primary care; development and evaluation of brief interventions; interprofessional training and collaboration.
Standardization and validation of performance-based measures of attention; validity studies of personality and diagnostic tests for adolescents and children; identification of neuropsychological and psychometric predictors of differential treatment response and outcome for psychiatric patients; evaluation of the management of violent and aggressive behavior by psychiatric inpatients.
Therapy and supervisory processes; veterans and trauma, women and leadership; stigma; program development.
Additional Research Mentors
Higher-order cognition: disentangling the role of attention in working memory; veterans and trauma: effects of trauma exposure on cognition and family processes; the transition of veterans: military duty to civilian life; adult ADHD/LD: behavioral and cognitive correlates of functioning; relationship between environmental and social context on developmental pathways in childhood; construction of personal narratives in response to trauma.
Georgia M. Winters, Ph.D. (Forensic Program Faculty)
Prevention of sexual violence; sexual grooming behaviors; consequences of child sexual abuse; institutional sexual abuse; sex trafficking; paraphilic interests, behaviors, and disorders.
Jennifer Romei, Ph.D. (Forensic Program Faculty)
Violence risk and protective factors in people with serious and persistent mental illness; violence risk mitigation and treatment strategies, and the resulting impact on criminal and civil legal decisions; gender differences in forensic inpatients; social cognition and mentalizing deficits in forensic patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and personality disorders; the impact of violence on inpatient health care workers; inpatient trauma-informed care practices.
Melissa N. Slavin, Ph.D. (Forensic Program Faculty)
Reducing barriers to care among individuals, particularly women, involved in criminal legal systems; the intersection of substance use disorders, sexual risk behavior, and sexual and reproductive health; treatment considerations for impacts of child sexual abuse and adult sexual assault, including intimate partner violence, on sexual behavior and substance use; assessment and treatment of addictive behaviors, such as compulsive sexual behavior, with a focus on gender-related differences; digital intervention science for addressing health disparities among vulnerable populations.