CFC Postdoctoral Trainees
Current Trainees
Justin (J.D.) Smith, Ph.D., received his doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the University of Tennessee in 2011. He completed his predoctoral clinical internship at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. He is interested in improving the utility and effectiveness of child and family interventions through the use of collaborative and therapeutic assessment paradigms, particularly the multimethod assessment. Dr. Smith has published extensively about the Therapeutic Assessment model (Finn, 2007) and is now integrating this knowledge with his research on the Family Check-Up. In his second year of fellowship, together with Drs. Tom Dishion and Beth Stormshak, Dr. Smith is studying the treatment fidelity of the Family Check-Up and its relation to mental health outcomes, early developmental trajectories of coercive family processes and disruptive behaviors, intervention strategies for coercive family dynamics, and implementation of the model in community mental health centers. He received a pilot study grant to refine the fidelity of implementation rating system methods, most notably longitudinal multivariate methods, Bayesian estimation, and single-case experimental designs with time-series measurement strategies. Dr. Smith's work appears in Psychological Assessment; Psychological Methods; Behavior Assessment; Journal of Adolescence; Families, Systems, & Health; and others. Dr. Smith currently serves as editor of the Clinical Case Applications section of the Journal of Personality Assessment and is editor of the newsletter The TA Connection. In the past year he received the Martin Mayman award and was named the 2013 John E. Exner Scholar from the Society for Personality Assessment.
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Argero Zerr, Ph.D., received her doctoral degree in developmental psychology from Arizona State University. Her research interests broadly focus on the study of cultural factors related to the development, measurement, and amelioration of internalizing problems in children and adolescents. In particular, she is interested in the design and evaluation of culturally informed intervention and prevention programs. At the CFC she is studying child, familial, and cultural characteristics related to the development and prevention of youth internalizing problems.
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Recent Postdoctoral Training Completed
Arin Connell, Ph.D., seeks to understand the etiology of internalizing disorders and co-occurring problems in children and adolescents. He is working on development and pilot testing of a depression-focused adaptation of the Family Check-Up for families with adolescents experiencing depression. Relevant expertise is the application of statistical modeling techniques, including latent growth and growth mixture modeling analyses, to longitudinal and prevention trial data sets.
Greg Fosco, Ph.D., received his doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Marquette University and his master's of science degree in child development from the University of California, Davis. He is currently a faculty member at Penn State. His research emphasizes family systems processes in children’s social, emotional, and behavioral functioning. Within this research framework, Greg’s research interests reflect an intersection of developmental and intervention science. He also is interested in studying the application of statistics and research methods to developing a more complete understanding of developmental processes and effective intervention strategies for children and their families. Following his postdoctoral training at CFC, Dr. Fosco served as CFC's family intervention scientist on an effectiveness study of the Family Check-Up intervention in Oregon public middle schools (the EcoFIT study).
Interdisciplinary postdoctoral fellow Erika Lunkenheimer, Ph.D., researches parent–child interaction and child self-regulation from a developmental psychopathology framework. She is interested in how adaptive and maladaptive parenting behaviors relate to trajectories of children’s self-regulation, school readiness, and behavior problems in early childhood. She also studies dyadic parent–child interaction processes. Her research involves the use of dyadic and dynamic systems analytic methods to capture patterns of microsocial interpersonal interaction.
Amber McEachern received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, with an emphasis in community psychology, from Wichita State University. She completed an NRSA postdoctoral fellowship in developmental psychopathology at the Child and Family Center, University of Oregon. She is interested in the development and remediation of psychopathology, especially antisocial behaviors, throughout the lifespan. In particular, Dr. McEachern's research focuses on the forms and functions of aggressive behaviors and antisocial behaviors, as well as familial, peer, and social processes that contribute to the development and treatment of antisocial behaviors. During her time at CFC, Dr. McEachern became particularly interested in individual differences in treatment adherence and efficacy. This led to her current position, focused on factors that contribute to the remediation of substance abuse among adolescents and young adults. Her current studies at the University of New Mexico investigate the role of cultural, environmental, neurological, and genetic factors in the treatment of substance abuse using motivational interviewing techniques.
Mark Van Ryzin, Ph.D., received his doctoral degree in educational psychology from the University of Minnesota in 2008. He is interested in how the social ecology of parents, peers, and adult mentors influences both positive adolescent development and psychopathology. During the first year of his postdoctoral appointment at the Child and Family Center, Dr. Van Ryzin has been able to attend several conferences, including the Society for Research in Child Development and the American Psychological Association annual conferences, both of which provided valuable contacts and networking opportunities. He has also collaborated with other scientists at the CFC (Drs. Dishion, Stormshak, Fosco, and Caruthers) on several manuscripts related to parenting, peers, antisocial behavior, substance use, and high-risk sexual behavior.
Marie-Hélène Véronneau, Ph.D., studies child and adolescent development, particularly their peer experiences and academic adjustment, within a longitudinal, developmental framework. At CFC she studied interaction effects among peer and family factors in the Next Generation sample and their relationships to academic and behavioral adjustment. She collaborated on several studies that examined developmental chains explaining early-adult outcomes in the Project Alliance 1 sample, including childbearing, problematic substance use, violent behavior, and educational attainment. Dr. Véronneau contributed to the Community Shadow Project by examining how family and peer relationships of American Indian youth relate to their substance use. She has also engaged in prevention research by collaborating on a study of intervention effects in the Project Alliance 2 sample.
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