The primary goal of our research is to help people relieve their suffering and reach their life goals. Our main focus lies in determining the optimal psychological interventions to treat individuals with anxiety and related disorders, including trauma, anxiety, depression and OCD. We believe that we can improve our treatments by understanding the psychological mechanisms involved in the maintenance and treatment of anxiety and depression. To this end, we are interested in examining the cognitive, behavioral, and affective aspects of trauma, depression, anxiety and related disorders, how comorbidity influences them, and the therapist and patient contributions to outcome. In addition, we are interested in optimizing treatments and disseminating them to the public mental health system.
More specifically, we are developing a multilevel research strategy examining factors related to the maintenance and treatment of trauma, depression and anxiety disorders including PTSD, panic disorder, social anxiety, general anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and other anxiety disorders. Overall, our general approach to research is to be theory-driven, integrative, and empirical. We believe strongly that most issues in clinical psychology should be examined through the scientific method using clinical intuition, and that integrating findings from disparate areas of psychology to come up with novel hypotheses will help advance knowledge. We plan on continuing to use this philosophy in order to continue our lines of research in mechanisms and treatment outcomes for trauma, OCD, anxiety disorders and depression.