I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the US, but I am originally from Maryland, and have lived in New York and Massachusetts. Presently, I am a clinical trainer and Associate Director of Research and Evaluation at the Center for Practice Transformation, and community faculty in the University of Minnesota School of Social Work, where I train practitioners and students to provide compassionate, evidence-based, and recovery-oriented care to people living with mental health disorders. Prior to this role, I worked as a practitioner in community psychiatry programs supporting adults work through acute mental health challenges, including suicide, self-harm, and substance use.
I am committed to training those in helping roles (e.g., social workers/therapists, medical students, psychiatric residents) in effective techniques and public health practitioners in program evaluation, program development, and research methods.
Since 2022, I have been a clinical trainer with the Center for Practice Transformation training providers on a range of topics, including the assessment of suicide and non-suicidal self-injury, ethics and supervision, behavioral tailoring, behavioral rehearsal, behavioral activation, behavioral experiments, Motivational Interviewing, rupture and repair, and diagnostic assessment.
During this period, I have also taught an advanced clinical course (Core Concepts in Clinical Social Work Practice) in the masters of social work (MSW) program at the University of Minnesota. Previously, I also served as a field instructor/supervisor for advanced clinical social work students at the University of Maryland School of Social Work, and as a practicum preceptor for masters of public health students (MPH) at Johns Hopkins University. While in clinical practice, I also regularly mentored and trained other clinical staff, provided monthly group consultations for staff on Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills application/formulation, and provided in-service training for staff on measurement-based care, intensive outpatient program level of care, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and the mental health of healthcare workers.
Starting in 2023, I was part of a team tasked with training all Minnesota child welfare professionals in MI as part of the Families First Prevention Services Act. We were tasked with evaluating the pilot period of this training and I analyzed feedback data from 180 learners about the various components of the training: a self-paced asynchronous component, instructor-led trainings, coaching circles, and a final skills demonstration. I helped to write feedback survey questions assessing training experience and training impact, as well as eliciting feedback about ways to improve these trainings. I was responsible for synthesizing and analyzing these results and disseminating them to various stakeholders involved in the project. I co-created (e.g., wrote content, did voice-overs, edited video, created assessment activities) the asynchronous self-paced training component. Moreover, for this project, I was one of two primary coders using the Behaviour Change Counseling Index (BECCI) to assess MI skills among child welfare professionals.
