I am a clinical psychologist who has dedicated the past thirty years to motivational interviewing training and coaching, intervention development and implementation, clinical research, and practice. I've trained, coached, and mentored professionals from a wide variety of disciplines working in substance use, mental health, and healthcare settings, in person and virtually, across the US and internationally.
I joined MINT in 1998. In 2008 I co-led MINT's Training of New Trainers. I served for nine years on MINT’s Board of Directors, including three years as Chair. I've been Editor of the MINT Bulletin and MINT’s online journal, Motivational Interviewing: Training, Research, Implementation, Practice (MITRIP). At various times I chaired the MINT Trainer Development and Certification Workgroup, the MINT Practitioner Certification Committee, and the MINT Forum Program Planning Committee. In 2022 was an organizer of the 6th International Conference on Motivational Interviewing.
For more than two decades I was a clinician, teacher, and clinical researcher in the departments of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. During that time I oversaw intervention development, training, and fidelity monitoring for a dozen clinical trials of MI in substance use, mental health, and health behavior settings. Most of my research focused on the development and testing of new applications of MI, in particular when used to enhance treatment engagement and adherence. I've spoken widely at international, national, and regional meetings and published more than 40 articles and chapters on this work. I spent the past nine years as a senior leader for a healthcare services company, responsible for clinical innovation in design and execution of MI-based telehealth advance care planning and patient navigation programs, as well as training, coaching, and quality assurance monitoring of practitioners and supervisors.
In 2015 I authored the first self-guided MI book, Finding Your Way to Change: How the Power of Motivational Interviewing Can Reveal What You Want and Help You Get There, published by Guilford Press and also available in Dutch, Italian, and Spanish. You can find my Psychology Today blog exploring the science and practice of motivational interviewing at Fueling the Fire of Change.
