About me

I'm an assistant professor in the psychology department at Utah State University. I'm a school psychologist by training and teach mental health courses within the department's school psychology programs. I'm both a licensed psychologist and a nationally certified school psychologist. At USU, I run a small lab focused on suicide/self-harm research. You can take a look at my CV here.

I thought for sure I was going to be a high school English teacher. I was fortunate to have several truly excellent English teachers in high school. They were the kind of teachers that not only taught literature, but taught us about the world and life lessons about ourselves. They supported countless students through a suicide cluster that gripped our small town high school.

So off to college I went, majoring in English and completing an undergraduate teaching program. Student teaching in the city was challenging and rewarding. And I met countless skilled and dedicated educators. Following a hiring freeze, I left New York and detoured to a masters of education program. There, I took a developmental psychopathology elective and briefly worked at an adolescent behavioral treatment residence. The psychopathology class was taught by a school psychologist—a career I had never heard of before. But I was hooked. The idea that we could, through science, help address and prevent mental health problems was game changing. My efforts shifted from being a teacher to more directly addressing youth mental health. In an incredible stroke of luck, that professor accepted me as her PhD student and changed the direction of my life.

During my doc studies at UMass, I got a solid grounding in behaviorism, mental health, and public education. I had many meaningful applied experiences, from various school-based practicum, to PBIS consulting, to years volunteering on a rape crisis hotline, to serving as a volunteer external foster care reviewer, to providing a year of full-protocol DBT. I was also introduced to applied statistics, psychometrics, single-case designs, and research-based practice.

I spent my internship and postdoc years providing school-based services within the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District—a very large district of over 120,000 students outside of Houston, TX. I absolutely loved my time there, as challenging as intern and postdoc years are. I am grateful for my supervisors, other staff psychologists, my intern cohort, my postdoc cohort, the dozens of incredible educators I had the privilege of working alongside, and of course, the students. Working in the schools through the pandemic was not for the faint of heart; the amount of good everyone was able to pull together for the students during that time was impressive. Following my postdoc, I was an assistant professor for three years in the combined school/clinical psychology program at the University of Houston Clear Lake.