On the Concurrent Use of Self-System Therapy and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Guided Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation as Treatment for Depression.

I am a clinical psychologist with a primary interest in outpatient interventions for difficulties managing emotional experiences that interfere with well-being. As a clinician, I specialize in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for adults who report a variety of mental health problems, including personality, mood, anxiety, eating, trauma, stress-related, adjustment, and impulse control disorders. My approach to psychotherapy includes working collaboratively with my patients to identify their unique life and therapy goals and implementing evidence-based interventions to achieve the identified goals. As an educator, I train clinicians nationally and teach graduate students, psychology and psychiatry residents in in how to effectively apply CBT and DBT in their clinical work. As a researcher, I focus on psychotherapy optimization and neuroscience-informed treatment development for emotion dysregulation. My research keeps me up to date with the latest evidence-based approaches to use in my clinical work, and my work with patients strongly influences the research that I do.  Outside of work, I enjoy traveling, gourmet food, nature adventures, and time with friends with family.

My research centers around the use of structural and functional imaging measures to study the shifts in network architecture in the aging brain. I am specifically interested in changes in how changes in structural and functional connectivity associated with aging impact the semantic retrieval of word or fact knowledge. Currently this involves asking why older adults have particular difficulty in certain kinds of semantic retrieval, despite the fact that vocabularies and knowledge stores typically improve with age.

A second line of research involves asking questions about how this semantic system is organized in young adults, understanding which helps form a basis for asking questions about older adults. To what degree are these semantic retrieval processes lateralized? What cognitive factors affect this laterality? How are brain structures like the corpus callosum involved in mediating distributed activation patterns associated with semantic retrieval?