Atina is a recipient of the 2022 Future Directions Launch Award. Atina is a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Dr. Joanne Davila & Dr. Jessica Schleider at Stony Brook University; she is also a Postdoctoral Affiliate at Stanford University in Dr. James Gross’ lab. Sponsored by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Atina earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Arizona and completed her internship at the VA in Palo Alto. As a relationship researcher, Atina investigates how our social contexts give rise to attachment orientations or emotion regulation capacities that impact our mental health outcomes across the lifespan. As a clinical scientist, she is invested in developing scalable relationship interventions that target transdiagnostic mechanisms of change for disadvantaged youth. Through this work, she hopes to increase healthy relationship functioning and promote more positive views of self/other to improve the trajectory of people’s lives. In Fall 2023, Atina will start a tenure-track faculty position as Assistant Professor at Santa Clara University.
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Zabin is a recipient of the 2022 Future Directions Launch Award. Zabin currently serves as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Dissemination & Implementation Science at Northwestern University. She earned her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Miami and completed her internship year at UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior in the general child track. Her research interests include evidence-based assessment methods, strategies to improve youth access to mental healthcare and improving the effectiveness of mental health services for children and families.
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Noah is a recipient of the 2022 Future Directions Launch Award. Noah aims to engage patients, mental health care providers, and policymakers to develop and refine solutions for increasing access to evidence-based mental health care in the U.S. and abroad. By examining various ways in which stakeholder perspectives are included in the research process, his research has the potential to generate acceptable and scalable solutions for increasing access to high-quality mental health care and improving health equity worldwide. In 2023, Noah will begin his clinical internship year at the Yale School of Medicine.
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Joe is a recipient of the 2021 Future Directions Launch Award. Joe specializes in serious mental illness research and clinical work, particularly the early stages of psychosis. Joe received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the CUNY Graduate Center (via John Jay College) in 2020 and completed his clinical psychology internship at the VA Maryland Health Care System/University of Maryland School of Medicine Psychology Internship Consortium. In 2022, Joe started a tenure-track faculty position as an Assistant Professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
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Hannah is a recipient of the 2021 Future Directions Launch Award. Hannah is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Harvard Medical School & McLean Hospital. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Maine, and completed her internship at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Her research examines the role of mental imagery in the etiology and treatment of mood disorders. She has a particular interest in examining physiological and affective response to maladaptive imagery-based cognition, such as imagery-based rumination, and evaluating and developing imagery-based treatments for depressed and/or suicidal youth. In 2022, Hannah started a tenure-track faculty position as an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University.
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Kesley is a recipient of the 2021 Future Directions Launch Award. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Kesley received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the Catholic University of America with a concentration in children, families, and cultures. She is broadly interested in understanding the mechanisms that underlie the etiology of and treatment for different neuropsychiatric conditions, specifically anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Tourette Syndrome, and obsessive-compulsive related disorders (OCRD).
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Kay is a recipient of the 2021 Future Directions Launch Award. She was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Teachers College, Columbia University. Kay received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Pennsylvania State University and completed her internship at State University of New York Upstate Medical University. Her research examines cognitive and emotional mechanisms of anxiety and depressive disorders and suicidality by leveraging mobile-based assessments to capture psychological processes as they unfold in real time, in the "real world" outside the laboratory. Kay currently holds a position as an assistant professor in the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program at Long Island University, Post, in New York.
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Anna is a recipient of the 2021 Future Directions Launch Award. She is currently a graduate student in Psychology at Columbia University. Anna is interested in understanding how neural and emotional development processes link early life experiences to risk and resilience for psychopathology across childhood and adolescence.
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Tyler received the 2020 Future Directions Launch Award in Autism. Tyler received her Ph.D. in Developmental and Clinical Psychology from Virginia Tech in 2022. Tyler’s work focuses on language development in clinical populations, specifically Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Tyler is particularly interested in how language develops in early infancy and in groups without spoken language (e.g., Deaf/Hard of Hearing and minimally-verbal/partially speaking autistic youth) to best inform social communication interventions. In 2022, Tyler started a Postdoctoral Fellow position at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s T32 training program, housed in the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities.
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Jessie is a recipient of the 2020 Future Directions Launch Award in Autism. Jessie completed a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2019. Jessie’s research investigates the mechanisms through which individual and contextual factors are associated with mental and physical health disparities in vulnerable populations. She is particularly interested in understanding how families promote healthy social and emotional development in individuals with special healthcare needs. Jessie is currently working on several projects aimed at understanding how different sub-system family processes (e.g., marital conflict, co-parenting, parent-child relationship quality) impact outcomes for children and youth with autism spectrum disorder. In 2022, Jessie started a tenure-track faculty position as an Assistant Professor at Lafayette College.
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2019 JCCAP Future Directions Launch Award Recipients. From left to right: John Cooley, Nicole Lorenzo, Andres De Los Reyes, and Erin Kang
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Erin Kang
John Cooley
Nicole Lorenzo
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![]() 2018 JCCAP Future Directions Launch Award Recipients. From left to right: Maggi Price, Spencer Evans, Andres De Los Reyes, and Emily Becker-Haimes
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Emily Becker-Haimes
Maggi Price
Spencer Evans
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Sunhye (Sunny) received the 2017 Future Directions Launch Award in Assessment. After receiving her Ph.D. in Clinical and Health Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018, she currently holds a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her lab focuses on daily family processes that shape adolescent development, with a focus on family-based risk and protective factors for youth internalizing problems. Learn more about Sunny's lab here: bai-lab.weebly.com/
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Taylor & Francis 2017 JCCAP Launch Award Recipient Interview
The JCCAP Future Directions Forum presents professional development training for early career researchers and showcases interdisciplinary research in child and adolescent mental health. This JCCAP Q&A features Sunny Bai from the University of California, Los Angeles, winner of the 2017 JCCAP Future Directions Launch Award. Sunny’s award was presented for her research on clinical child and adolescent assessment. T&F: Tell us about your research. Sunny Bai: In my research, I am really interested in understanding how adolescents’ daily experiences at school and at home and throughout the night contribute to psychopathology and, specifically, internalizing symptoms. I'm interested in assessment because I like to utilize creative, naturalistic methods to really, really understand what teens' daily lives look like. Sunny has coauthored a paper that appeared in JCCAP: “Individual Differences in Optimum Sleep for Daily Mood During Adolescence.” Her fellow researchers included Andrew J. Fuligni, Jennifer L. Krull, and Nancy A. Gonzales. T&F: Can you describe the study and its results? SB: We were really interested in trying to assess whether sleep and sleep recommendations would be a one-size-fits-all thing or if we need to tailor recommendations for teens. So, this was one of the first attempts to really assess whether teens vary in sleep need. So for example, one teen may feel their best when they sleep about nine hours a night. Another teen might feel their best when they sleep about seven hours a night. So, that's what this particular paper was about. Specifically, we found that children or teens who have more internalizing symptoms, so symptoms of anxiety and depression, needed more sleep to feel their best. T&F: Do you have any advice for current early career researchers on how to publish? SB: One thing that helped me was to just keep writing and rewriting and writing again. There was certainly many times when I wanted to stop writing, but it really does feel good when it's done and submitted, so just keep going. As far as looking for right outlets to publish, I think one advice that I got was to look at where the papers I was citing came from because you're more likely to cite from journals that are relevant to your topic of research. I certainly cite the SCCAP journal quite a bit in my work, and I think it's a really great outlet for work in developmental psychopathology and clinical psych. T&F: Can you describe your trajectory out of graduate school and into the job market? SB: That transition was really actually kind of fast and a little bit overwhelming. As a clinical psych student, I, of course, have to do a clinical internship, and I did it at UCLA, where I had completed grad school. The internship allowed me to meet some additional mentors outside of psychology, more in psychiatry, and I stayed on to do a T32, postdoctoral fellowship in suicide research, actually. I wanted to study children at higher risk and take my research in that direction. From there, I actually went on the job market during the first year of postdoc and accepted an offer to be an assistant professor at the Penn State University in their Department of Human Development and Family Studies. I'm very excited about that. I'm going to be starting there on July 1st. And certainly, all my mentors throughout grad school and those I met at the conference last year were incredibly helpful. I talked to a lot of people and … it was a really tough process. It was a lot of work to go on the job market, and I felt really grateful to have so many people that I could ask questions to. Congratulations, Sunny! Published on 10 September 2018. |
Taylor is a recipient of the 2017 Future Directions Launch Award in Suicide and Self- Injury. Taylor is a clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She specializes in the prediction and prevention of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) among adolescents and young adults. Taylor uses novel methodologies and computational approaches to improve the identification of individuals at risk to better intervene and prevent SITBs. Taylor earned her BA in psychology at Duke University and her PhD in clinical psychology at Temple University. She subsequently completed a pre-doctoral clinical psychology internship and an NIMH-funded T32 post-doctoral fellowship in child mental health at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Taylor holds a five-year NIMH career development award that focuses on using passive mobile sensing, adolescent sleep and physical activity assessment, and advanced computational approaches to idiographic modeling to develop proximal risk models for increases in suicidal ideation. She also has other ongoing research supported by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the NIMH focused on leveraging computer vision to enhance suicide risk screening in pediatric health care settings. Learn more about Taylor's work here: https://connects.catalyst.harvard.edu/Profiles/display/Person/200999
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Taylor & Francis 2017 JCCAP Launch Award Recipient Interview
The JCCAP Future Directions Forum presents professional development training for early career researchers and showcases interdisciplinary research in child and adolescent mental health. This JCCAP Q&A features Taylor Burke from Temple University, winner of the 2017 JCCAP Future Directions Launch Award. Tess’s award was presented for her research on suicide and self-injury among children and adolescents. T&F: Tell us about your research. Taylor Burke: My research in general seeks to inform the prediction and prevention of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors among this age group. One arm of my research looks at understanding the interplay of cognitive, effective, behavioral, environmental, and biological risk factors for self-injury. My dissertation specifically looks at better understanding those types of factors underlying the surge in non-suicidal self-injury in adolescents. I actually recently receive grant funding to use machine learning to enhance suicide risk assessment screening in pediatric healthcare settings, so primary care and emergency departments. And then I'm also really interested in understanding the negative consequences of engaging in self-injury. You know, how one form of self-injury might lead to greater risk for future self-injury. Specifically, really interested in what makes it so that those who engage in non-suicidal self-injury, what makes it so that they're more likely to transition to suicidal self-injury, because we see this quite a bit. Also, when individuals have engaged in non-suicidal self-injury, one of the outcomes often is scarring from the behavior, so I've really tried to understand kind of how individuals relate to their scarring, how that might in turn affect them psychologically, but also how that might affect their interpersonal relationships. So, recently have worked on a study looking at what stigmatization do these individuals face in their environment. Might that be another reason why we are seeing these individuals go on to start to engage in suicidal behaviors? T&F: Can you describe the experience of being published for the first time? TB: For my first first-authored article, I remember just checking my email again and again, hoping to hear back from the editor, and when I finally did and I got that good news, it just felt like such an accomplishment, and it was just an extremely reinforcing experience. So I think that that experience of accomplishment, kind of getting the final say that what you did was worthwhile and other people might be interested in reading it, it really has increased my dedication to research and wanting to publish more. But also, it's actually really made me more dedicated to getting postbac research assistants and first year, second year grad students on my projects with me, to kind of pass that on to others and kind of help ignite that motivation that it helped to ignite within me. T&F: Do you have any advice for current early career researchers on how to publish? TB: Find an area that you are extremely curious about and just simply internally motivated to learn about. Then two, to schedule writing blocks for yourself, and to make sure to not allow yourself to move those writing blocks when something comes up, because something always comes up, and it's really easy to not prioritize it, so really important to kind of stick that into your calendar and try to stick by it. Taylor will be completing an internship at Brown University before her graduation. T&F: Tell us a little about the internship and what you expect to work on. TB: I'll be working at Brown, and I'm going to be in their clinical child track, so I'm going to be doing clinical work with high-risk youth. I'll be working at an inpatient unit, partial hospitalization unit, as well as in schools, with youth, many of whom have engaged in self-injury. I'll also be working with a research team here at Brown that studies the prediction and prevention of youth self-injury, so working with some experts in the field and really looking forward to learning from them. T&F: How has mentorship played a role in your career thus far? TB: I'd say that I was introduced to the field, actually, as a research assistant at Brown, with the research team that I'm going to be working with now. And that was kind of where I had my first experience with this research area, and my first kind of introduction to conducting empirical research. I worked with Dr. Anthony Spirito and Dr. Jennifer Wolff at that time, and they really were extremely encouraging, and wanted to listen to my ideas, even immediately after I graduated from college. That really helped to increase my interest in the field, and then when I started at Temple, I began working with my mentor that I've been with for the past five years, Dr. Lauren Ellis. She has a number of huge R01s, and I got to see kind of how those large-scale studies are run, and my mentor was really wonderful in allowing me to conduct independent research during my graduate school career. I conducted three different studies, and she really allowed me to kind of learn how to be an independent researcher, which has been extremely helpful. So now I'm looking toward returning to those initial mentors that I had, and to continue to learn from them. Congratulations, Taylor! Published on 10 September 2018. |
Tess received the 2017 Future Directions Launch Award in Conduct Problems. After receiving her Ph.D. in Clinical and Developmental Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2016, she currently holds a position as Research Scientist and Licensed Psychologist at the Oregon Social Learning Center. She is interested in investigating how to improve access to evidence-based practices for youth and young adults with substance use and mental health symptoms, particularly for those with justice system involvement. Most recently, her research has concentrated on the prevention and intervention for the misuse of prescription drugs, cannabis use, and polysubstance use in primarily young adults. Learn more about her work here: www.researchgate.net/profile/Tess_Drazdowski
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Taylor & Francis 2017 JCCAP Launch Award Recipient Interview
The JCCAP Future Directions Forum presents professional development training for early career researchers and showcases interdisciplinary research in child and adolescent mental health. This JCCAP Q&A features Tess Drazdowski from Virginia Commonwealth University, winner of the 2017 JCCAP Future Directions Launch Award. Tess’s award was presented for her research on conduct problems among children and adolescents. T&F: Tell us about your research. Tess Drazdowski: Right now, the conduct problem that I am researching the most is substance use and looking at how substance use, and people who have histories of being in the justice system and how those correlate and influence each other. And I'm really interested now in looking at venting and treating substance use in emerging adults, and who have substance use and histories of justice system involvement. I have a grant going in today looking at using peer professional coaches to provide substance use services along with vocational educational coaching to emerging adults with substance use and justice system involvement through a provision of parole services here in Oregon. So that's one of the areas that I'm focusing on along with prescription drug misuse including opioids and marijuana use in adolescents and emerging adults as well. Tess was working at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine when her first coauthored paper was published. T&F: Can you describe your experience being published for the first time? What did you find most helpful along the path to publication? TD: It's great to find good mentors and people who support you in your goals especially, you know, we talk about research here and your research goals and clinical goals. So when I was there as research coordinator and I was working with very productive research teams, and they were very supportive and understood the publishing process and how to get published. So they really took me under their wing and guided me through the whole process of writing a paper from developing hypotheses by looking at the literature, and then doing secondary data analysis on data that they had already collected, did those relations exist as I thought they did in the data, and then when I found things that did exist as we theorized, putting them together for presentations and publications. So the first time I did it, I was not the lead author. I think I was second author, second or third author, and I remember being very nervous to upload. It was my responsibility to get all the text boxes and everything in order. I did it and it was very exciting to get that first publication and to see my name come up on a paper. And I remember I sent it to my parents and to my other, my previous mentors, and it was a very big moment of pride for me. It's interesting now that I've done it this many times that I don't feel that same level of nervousness anymore which I think is interesting. Some things I feel like you always get a little nervous for, but now it's just like okay, we'll go through, we see what happens. We get the feedback and you know, we move forward. But I remember being very nervous the first time I did it to make sure all the pieces were there and all the T’s were crossed and I’s were dotted. T&F: Do you have any advice for current early career researchers on how to publish? TD: I believe finding good mentors is first and foremost, finding people who are interested in the same things you're interested in researching and publishing an studying, and seeking their advice and help. And I know some of the best advice I got was when you're writing a paper. Just check through your own references and see where are the people where you're citing, where has their work been published, so that's a good first step. But then also just talking to your mentors who know the fields better, and seeing where they suggest you publish, and getting advice. Then sometimes just going on and using like the analytics that are available from Google or Web of Science or others places to see where different journals stack up in terms of impact factors, to decide what would be appropriate of your work as well, and just reading the recent articles. That's something I always do still, is I pull up the most journal, the most recent publications from the journal, and see if those types of papers that they're publishing are similar to the one that I'm doing that I think would be a good fit for that journal or not. T&F: Can you describe your trajectory out of grad school and into the job market? TD: I've been very fortunate to have amazing mentors who are really interested in me as a person, and what I'm interested in. And even though I did both clinical and developmental psychology, I decided through my grad program and experiences that I had there that I really enjoyed research, and was looking for 100% research opportunities. And so out of grad school, because I did want to get licensed, I did complete a post-doc and I did at the University of California Los Angeles, UCLA, and I did it in their integrated substance abuse programs. I picked a program that was research intensive, where really the clinical work that I did was extra and it was primarily research. Then while I was there I started applying for jobs, and was really fortunate that I landed and was offered a job in an ideal environment for me, so I'm now at the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene, Oregon, doing 100% research, which for me is really exciting. I focus on work with youth and families, so it's a great fit for me, and just the whole for me, work-life balance and mentality around working with families and understanding that they are employees who have families of their own has just been a really good balance so far. So, I think I had great support at every level, and I still go back to my adviser, one of my advisers from grad school who has just been so helpful. She just wrote me another letter for a grant I'm putting in this week, and just knowing that I have the support and understanding of people who have gone before me has been really helpful. Then just also taking the time to reflect on okay, what do I really like, what's a good fit for me, and then just being fortunate that there are openings at places that that can work. Congratulations, Tess! Published on 10 September 2018. |