Academia is not the only path!

• Important to think about how women fit into academia (relatively underrepresented despite more women being in the field of psychology at large)

What kinds of research topics are you interested in?

• Yen-ling and Sam - pediatric mood
• Yen-ling
  • Cultural differences + prediction modeling studies and techniques
  • In 5 years: Go back to Taiwan to teach at a university
• Sam
  • Changing diagnostic trends in BSD, pediatric mood and sleep disorders
  • In 5 years: Academic medical center or psych dept
• Jen
  • Transdiagnostic examination of impulsivity (experiencing an emotion that immediately triggers action)
  • How does recruitment, etc change between different settings (AMC, smaller clinics, etc)?
• Dr. Weinstock
  • More severely ill patients in AMC
  • Suicide in BSD; suicide prevention
  • Also more recently interested in criminal justice settings and recruiting from the criminal justice system
    • Greater points of contact with hospitals/infrastructure
    • Higher base rates of all psychopathology (~40% reported history of mania)
• Hannah
  • Used to work at McClane at 3 East (Boston)
  • In 5 years: AMC, maybe private practice
• Abigail
  • In 5 years: AMC

What are the challenges you observe in recruitment?

• YL + S not actively recruiting BSD participants currently
  • Easier in AMC than psych dept
  • J + Dr. C agree that it’s easier in AMC
• Dr. C likes the culture of a psych department
  • Sense of community
  • Harder to find a niche/crew in AMC
• S:
  • Community outreach to psychiatric inpatient units?
  • DCFS, state department barriers
• J:
  • Institutional counseling services (CAPS) to identify undergrads is also hard
• Dr. W:
  • Partnerships with community MH can be good for recruitment
  • Old way: the people doing the clinical trials are not the people who deliver those interventions to the community
    • Moving in the right direction
    • Integrating community MH professionals (recruiting the staff in a community)
• Dr. C:
  • Formal practicum experiences are set up like a Bay Area-wide consortium
  • On-the-ground engagement in communities by students who are also involved in the research
  • Practicums are very homegrown
  • Feels like she gets to wear many hats and get a variety of experiences in AMC setting as opposed to in psych depts
• Dr. W:
  • Knew that she did not love classroom teaching (that’s not why she got a PhD!)
    • Psych dept jobs always involve teaching
    • AMC also involves teaching but very different (supervision, special topics, no grading papers/exams)
  • Working in a medical setting allows her to come into contact with the populations she’s interested in
  • Research, teaching, and service are weighted very differently in AMCs (research is like 90%)
  • Personally focuses on research
  • Because there aren’t administrative avenues to cover other efforts in Academia… only getting paid 100% for everything despite putting more than 100% effort
    • Less flexibility within Brown’s structure specifically
    • Definitely a tradeoff of priorities

Sam: In an academic medical center where money comes from grants, how do you balance what your research interests are and what is “fundable”?

• Dr. W: Can’t invest time in something that she’s not interested in
  • Have to be invested in the idea for a grant so it actually gets written
  • Need to be strategic but stay within something that you have a passion or interest for
  • Gave example of suicide prevention in criminal justice with NIMH
  • “Highest risk population in the highest risk setting”
    • Reflects interest in severe psychopathology
    • A lot of investigators are not comfortable taking those risks (hierarchy, red tape, stressful)
• Dr. C: Non-linear path to where she is currently
  • Dovetails role of being a female in psychology
    • Part of it is saying yes and also expectations of flexibility
  • As a junior person, you need to try to stay true to your core
    • Developing persistence in finding your “oomph”
    • Not just either research vs clinical career
  • Definitely involves strategy to strike the right balance for your personal interests

J: Especially in AMCs, there are challenges with pulls on your time, setting boundaries for when to say no. What do you wish you had known?

• Dr. C: Personally drawn towards people (esp women) who serve as models
  • Used to be drawn towards big names but now drawn more towards big hearts
  • Working and mentoring helps her stay young and stay involved socially
• Dr. W
  • Saying no more now because she can, but saying yes definitely served her well in the past (especially for women)
    • Once you’re around long enough, you develop the currency to say no to things
    • Hard to say no to ~buttery~ requests but it’s easier when she knows she’s where she’s where she wants to be without them
  • Engaged in a lot because so much sounded fun and interesting
  • The people she enjoyed spending time with are now her collaborators and her professional network
    • Sometimes you don’t realize you’re developing that network from your peers when you’re focused on just the senior people

J: Question about future of being a bipolar research, a lot of stuff is transdiagnostic. What are your thoughts on where the field is moving?

• Dr. W: If you stick it out long enough, the trend shifts
  • Priorities and “hot areas” come and go because science evolves and changes over time
    • Ride out the waves
  • Mechanisms, computational modeling, etc have the long-term payoff but do not necessarily address immediate, short-term needs
    • Services realm is more short-term

Rachel Vaughn-Coaxum

• Postdoc at University of Pittsbhurgh working with Dr. Tina Goldstein
• Research interests: EBA, psychosocial treatments and how childhood adversity plays a part
  • Healthy habits help and triggers
  • Childhood trauma

Warren

• Grad student with Ana van meter
• Research Interests: Web-based interventions utilized for access in adolescence

Marina

• Postbac with Andy
• Massachusetts General Hospital

Has done research with:

• Fitbit and online behavior therapy with participants that have Cardiovascular disease and mental illness
  • They saw higher retention but a lower startup
• Involved in gene research that includes 4 sites are conducting similar in genes to Jarrod's

Josh Langfus

• Grad student with Eric Youngstrom
• Research Interests Sleep and irritability
• Evidenced-based assessment (EBA) and dissemination of EBA tools

Caroline Vincent

• Undergrad in Dr. Youngstrom's lab
• HGAPS member

Jarrod M. Leffler, Ph.D., L.P.

• Interested in accurate family-based treatment
• Uses MFPEP, IFPEP
• Has done research with people in outpatient clinics.
• Conducted research at Mayo
  • A 2-week family-based elements of MFPEP and elements of DBT
• Does work with gene mapping with Gwas
  • Early research has been inconclusive
• Has done work with the Gene Psyc swab test
  • It looks at how you metabolize meds
  • It uses a stoplight system
    • Green can take
    • Yellow caution when taking or consider not taking
    • Red do not take
  • It is not reliable. Often patients have been on medication and done well when the system says they shouldn't
    • Further questions and limitations: Patient makeup and People taking multiple meds
    • Problems: Pristic is not put through proper channels and is just viewed as safe
• Looked at decision making based on Genpsyc test
• Involved with a project that is similar to Amy West’s rainbow project
  • Looks at Dni and how it applies to bp
  • MFPEP, DBT, and ACT
  • 4 groups have IPT content
    • Questions and further directions:
      • What does it look like in the literature?
      • Outcome studies are the next direction.

General discussion

• Interested in the dissemination of treatment.
  • Thinks about to load on therapists to learn new information a treatment practices
    • Can we make it manageable?
    • Can we get therapists to do it?
    • How to handle missing sessions of MFPEP?
    • How to balance the integrity and the flexibility of treatment?

• Assessment
  • Looked at the Phq9 compared to scales with normative data to give more information
  • Working on creating clinical significance benchmarks for psychological measures

• Technology
  • Anxiety coach an app
  • Amod app
  • Cogeto
  • Analyzes voice emotion

• Social media
  • Needs to be more private
  • How to and who would vet info
  • It does provide connective care
  • It could be used to help in addition to care or while waiting for an appointment

• Machine learning and AI may be a possible solution to technology-based treatment
• Need training data
• NLP to classify and help understand
  • But stakes are high
• Passive monitoring may be helpful

• Risk calculator tries to do this using information from habits
  • attempts to Predict the onset of next episode

• Passive monitoring
  • What is the passive monitoring picking up and what of it is useful
  • Overfitting could be a problem

• Questions re: specialization & finding mentors (i.e., grad school) who do EXACTLY what you're interested in
  • Intersectionality is possible!
  • Choose someone who does one of the many things you're interested in & carve a space for yourself

• How can you integrate more research into your career when you primarily focus on clinical work (especially when you're early in your career)?
  • Working in academic medicine can promote a balance
    • Downsides: there aren't hard lines of money in academic medicine
    • Starting out in this career, it can be hard to carve out research time
  • Getting your own funding is the most direct way to carve out more time
    • K or early career awards
  • Being very early in your career makes it tougher to carve out time
    • You get told to say "yes" to everything, but you have to shift to being your own boss
  • Protect some time to work on grants with others
    • May give you the space and time to write your own grants

• Careers in academic medicine
  • PROS:
    • You don't have to teach, if that's not something you're interested in
    • Merges clinical work and research
    • You can do clinical work that informs your research, and research that informs your clinical work
    • Opportunities to work with many different people, perspectives, and research questions
    • Very interdisciplinary
  • CHALLENGES:
    • "Soft" money
      • ...BUT you can do things like take leadership or administrative positions so that some of your salary is covered by non-research endeavors
  • Dr. West works at Children's Hospital Los Angeles
    • Her K was based on developing a treatment for pediatric bipolar disorder (the RAINBOW Program)
    • The ability to integrate clinical work and research is Dr. West's favorite part of academic medicine
    • She currently is working on a postpartum study and PCORI funding (speaks to interdisciplinary nature of academic medicine)

• How do you get experience in different environments during your graduate/early career training?
  • Pay attention to practicum/externship options when you're applying to graduate schools
    • There are more options than you think
    • Some will have options for academic medical settings, community clinics, etc.
    • Some will only have options for internal sites
    • Some will require to you apply out to different clinics or practices to get your experience

• Can you be involved in medical (i.e., psychiatry, medicine) research as a Ph.D.?
  • Yes!
  • Join a team of psychiatrists AND psychologists

• Is psychosocial treatment research dead?
  • No!
    • ...BUT successfully funded lines of investigation are more about mechanisms of treatment response, and include looking at biomarkers (e.g., inflammatory response) as a component
      • Know what's getting funded and figure out ways of marrying this with your interests and goals

• Other career options and advice for psychologists
  • Boundless opportunities!
  • Technology companies (e.g., Google, Apple) may hire psychologists for full time or consultant positions
  • You usually need to be license eligible for academic medical positions, so make sure you're considering this when you apply