Lab year in review: 2024-2025

I just wrapped up my academic first year at Utah State University. It has been a great move. Great colleagues, great town, great views, great students. The political situation in Utah though is... not ideal. The college of education (where the Department of Psychology is that I'm located within) is dealing with a nearly 5 million dollar cut imposed by the state legislature. That's on top of lost grants and indirects at the federal level. I also spent time this year advocating (with the Utah School Mental Health Collaborative) for languages changes that reduced the harm of a state-wide bill that limited school-mental health services. But that aside, lots of good things happened related to the lab this year.

I took three trips this year - Seattle for NASP, Philadelphia for ISITDBT and ABCT (where I got to wear this pin supporting Christopher Martell for ABCT president!), and Forth Worth for a meeting of the Jordan Elizabeth Harris Foundation. While it didn't involve travel, I had a great time presenting two posters (and moderating five sessions) at the online Suicide Research Symposium.

Despite the move and new course preps, I was able to publish two first-author articles, be part of two other articles, and currently have three more under review. The first was a conceptual article on the potential harms of school-based suicide prevention efforts published in Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology. The other first author manuscript looked at nationally representative estimates of emergency department visits for injuries from non-fatal intentional self-harm gunshot wounds, published in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior. The other two articles were measurement projects: One with Megan Rogers looking at psychological closeness to suicide means and one with Tyler Renshaw on validating an internalizing psychopathology screener with college students.

I also am Co-I an R21 was that submitted to NIDA that proposes to use pre-existing data to better understand the developmental trajectories of substance use and suicidality in adolescents. (Though obviously with the current national situation... I'm not getting my hopes up that this will be funded.)

That said, there is a lot to look forward to next academic year. My teaching load will be more aligned with my areas of expertise than it's ever been. I'll be teaching a course on school-based mental health assessment (which I also taught this fall) and a course of school-based mental health interventions (which will be a new prep for me this year). I'm also launching (with two intrepid advanced practicum students) an adolescent DBT program at the behavioral health clinic within the Sorensen Center for Clinical Excellence.

In the fall, two outstanding individuals are joining the lab as PhD students. And two lab alumni from the Houston years will be defending their dissertations (one looking at measurement invarience of thwarted belongingness and perceived buredensomness across autistic and non-autistic samples, and one evaluating gender/ethnicity bias in suicide risk predictions from generative AI chatbots).

Lastly, the lab welcomed a new mascot - Tessy the lab dog got a younger brother! Everyone meet Frost. He's the most mellow Husky mix boy there ever was.