Lab year in review: 2025-2026

We're into July, which means two full years at USU have passed. USU continues to be a great place for me. Good people at all levels: Admin, faculty, students. Lots of beautiful mountain views and, this year, a very mild winter. And our program got full APA accreditation for the next 10 years!

I published two more manuscripts in good journals this year plus a book chapter, with 5 more under review and another several moving toward final drafts. I also submitted a R03-style pilot grant to the University of Washington's Suicide Care Research Center. The grant was declined, but they've allowed me to join their mentorship program an emerging scholar. I was also part of writing a large IES training grant that was a collaboration between the school psychology program and the special education program to coordinate graduate training to support students with both academic and mental health/behavioral disabilities. This was unfortunately also declined. However, I was Co-I on a state grant lead by Greg Callan that was funded and will provide some financial support for our EdS students.

Tiffany and Ellie, the two first year doc students in the lab and my first doc students at USU, have been wonderful additions! I'm so glad they're here. They're working hard on projects that should start coming out in the next year. Our program didn't admit any doc students this year, but next year I'll interview to accept a student for fall 2027. Send talented and dedicated folks my way! I was also on the committees of three students who successfully defended their dissertations this year—two former students at UHCL and one USU student.

I chaired a search for a teaching faculty line in the program, which was successful (phew)! We are very lucky to have Dr. Lora Israelsen join our program faculty in the fall to teach assessment courses and supervise assessments in the clinic. Having more assessment capacity at the clinic is also a win for the local community, which doesn't have many assessment options. Unexpectedly, our program was also able to hire an associate professor through a college-level cluster hiring initiative. Dr. Aaron Fischer (formerly at the University of Utah) will join our program starting in the fall as well. This is an absolute win for us!

I did not travel much this year, but I did attend the International Association of Suicide Research conference in Boston last fall. I presented a poster and had a great time enjoying the company of friends/colleagues. I'm looking forward to attending in fall 2027 in Montreal (and to finally submitting the manuscript version of the poster presentation, which has taken longer than expected)!

Launching the adolescent DBT program did not go to plan. We had much more difficulty recruiting clients than expected. This meant that each prac student only got one client for full protocol DBT and the rest of their hours were spent providing CBT and PMT. The students did not get as many hours initially as expected, but they were flexible and we made it work the best we could! I'm not continuing the DBT program this year and am stepping back from supervision for the time being. Next year I do get to teach a didactic DBT course though! I'd still like to have involvement in clinical work in the future, but I'm not sure what the next iteration looks like yet.