I told Emily I should write a blog post about what I’m up to for work these days. She said I should let her write it and see how accurate it is – it was a funny joke (but actually she pretty much got it right).
I’m a family scientist / clinical researcher / social scientist – whatever you want to say. My Ph.D. is in Family Social Science and Couple and Family Therapy (CFT). My master’s degree is also in CFT and if I only wanted to do clinical work I could have stopped with the master’s. The Ph.D. is a research degree and the overlap with therapy is that I’m interested in applied / clinical research.
Generally speaking, I’m interested in preventing negative child outcomes in families and communities that experience traumatic events or other stressors by supporting/intervening with parents. This translates into interests in psychological trauma, prevention science, parenting and parent training programs, cross-cultural research, and lots of other fun methodological stuff. I absolutely love my work – and I love to talk about it if you have questions. I’ll just briefly summarize my job and the projects I’m working on now so you can come up with all sorts of fun questions.
Right now – and hopefully for the next three years – I am a post-doctoral fellow in the Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health in the Department of Pediatrics in the University of Minnesota Medical School. Within my post-doc, half of my time is working on a faculty member’s project and the rest of my time is working on my own research. In total, I’m working on 5 research projects, which I’ll briefly describe below. My hope is to have a research faculty position when I’m done with my post-doc (i.e., about 75-80% of my time would just be research). I also maintain a small private practice seeing clients one day a week, so I’ll describe that quickly first.
