Research

My research program connects three complementary aims: understanding clinically meaningful mental health processes, improving how those processes are measured, and applying those measures to questions of treatment and care. The domains below are interconnected components of this broader program.

Domain 01

Mental health processes across development

I study how stress, reward learning, fear, and cognitive control relate to vulnerability to anxiety and depression across development, drawing on behavioral, neurobiological, and translational research.

stress & vulnerabilityanxiety & depressionreward learningcognitive controlfear & social behaviordevelopmental psychopathology
Domain 02

Computational and multimodal measurement

I develop quantitative and interpretable measures—including EEG markers, physiological arousal markers, behavioral task metrics, speech-derived acoustic and linguistic features, and clinical and sociodemographic indicators—and investigate insights gained through integrating these complementary modalities.

machine learningEEG & electrophysiologybehavioral tasksspeech & languageclinical & sociodemographicmultimodal integration
Domain 03

Treatment response and therapeutic processes

I examine predictors and moderators of treatment response and develop measures of therapeutic processes associated with improvement, including changes that unfold during exposure-based CBT for pediatric anxiety.

pediatric anxiety treatmentexposure-based CBTpredictors & moderatorswithin-session processesspeech-derived markersbehavioral coding
Current research emphasis

My current faculty research program builds on a distinct line of work that began in 2025 with support from a Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Grant. This research focuses on developing scalable, interpretable measures of therapeutic processes and treatment response in anxious youth. Current work specifically examines speech-derived indicators of mechanism engagement and treatment response during exposure-based therapy in this population.

Methods

How I work

My work integrates clinical science, neuroscience, and data science, drawing on methods selected to fit the scientific question. The scientific question and measurement problem come first; analytic methods are selected accordingly.

Clinical science

Grounded in practice

Trained and practiced as a psychotherapist, which shapes how I define clinically meaningful measurement targets.

Neuroscience

Mechanisms of behavior

Behavioral and electrophysiological study of stress, reward, and cognitive control, from animal models to humans.

Data science

Signal from complexity

Computational and statistical methods that turn noisy, multimodal data into interpretable measures.

Methods toolkit
Statistical modeling Machine learning Signal processing EEG and electrophysiology Behavioral task analysis Speech and language analysis Multimodal data integration Emerging computational methods