News and Announcements

  • Congratulations to Arianna Abulevsko, Violet Terwilliger, Camila Mira, and Nicole Kelso for winning the award for top poster at the 2021 Rowan Psychology Research Conference. The poster evaluated predictors of perceived stress trajectories among incoming students (first-years and new transfers) during their transition to a large university.
  • Nicole Kelso successfully defended her first-year research project, an important milestone in the Clinical Psychology PhD program!
  • In the Fall 2021, we welcomed five new graduate trainees to our lab. Anisha Satish, Samantha Mindlin, Rachel Odland, Michael Klug, and Maheen Mohammad.
  • Nicole Kelso presented a poster at the annual meeting of the Association for Behavioral & Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) in November 2021.
  • Anisha Satish received a Minority Travel Award to attend the Society for Prevention Research annual conference in June 2011.


Mission

Our lab, in the Rowan University Department of Psychology, conducts research aimed at preventing chronic health conditions. To that end, We have four specific areas of focus:

  1. Risk identification. Identifying individuals at elevated risk for health problems and in greatest need of preventive services
  2. Etiology. Identifying modifiable processes that contribute to the development of chronic health conditions
  3. Intervention. Developing, evaluating, and implementing interventions targeting etiological factors that contribute to chronic health conditions in real-world settings
  4. Research synthesis. Conducting quantitative reviews to evaluate the strength of evidence for key etiological theories and preventive interventions


Core Principles

  • Transparency. We work to make our research methods and findings as transparent as possible. Whenever possible, we share data and our analytic code, allowing others to reproduce and critique our results.
  • Patient-Centered Research. We subscribe to the patient-centered research approach in which the population of interest in a research study should be involved from the outset in all phases of the research process. We strive to work together with patient representatives and stakeholders to ensure that our work addresses questions that are of greatest value to the populations we study.
  • Transdiagnostic targets. Our group does not focus on a single health outcome. Rather, we are interested in studying etiological processes that contribute to a number of chronic health outcomes. For instance, we study the role that prenatal and infant immune development plays in both mental and physical health outcomes.