There is an influx of intellectual energy in the training of clinical psychology undergraduates with the arrival of two new faculty members, Emma Schiestl and Natasha Hansen. No matter what occupations students wish to pursue – whether it is a master’s in social work or counseling or a Ph.D. in clinical psychology or tech jobs in behavioral health at the bachelor’s level – the mission of this dynamic duo is to equip undergraduates in the new degree program with sophisticated scientific frameworks for understanding the mind and brain and with state-of-the-art, evidence-based methods for addressing mental health issues.
As Schiestl points out, “Our goal is to put our heads together about how we envision the program moving forward and to conceptualize the core components students will need.” Overall, their approach, she says, “is geared to reducing the scientist-practitioner gap, by training people in the practice of evidence-based care models.”
A newly created major in clinical psychology has four core courses that distinguish it from the psychology B.A. and B.S. One of these courses is “Foundations in Clinical Science,” a broad overview of how we can use scientific methods to evaluate treatments and programs, make sure our assessments are working in the ways we expect them to work, and provide building blocks to more advanced courses.
“We talk about reliability and validity,” says Schiestl, “specifically of our treatments and assessments, and focus on how we know if our treatments are working in the way we think they are working. Is the treatment we are prescribing the thing that is actively leading to change or is it something else?”
Schiestl comes to the position with experience teaching undergraduates as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and as a guest professor at Colorado College. At Michigan she developed a course on eating disorders and food addiction theory, the topic of her dissertation.
“My mom was a food scientist when I was growing up, so that is where I got my interest in food addiction,” she explains. But for as long as she can remember, Schiestl says, she has always been “a psychology nerd. I’ve just been really interested in human behavior.” She remembers how in middle school her parents got her Freud’s book On Dreams for Christmas. She took an AP Psychology course in high school. In college she majored in psychology and philosophy.
We talk about reliability and validity, specifically of our treatments and assessments, and focus on how we know if our treatments are working in the way we think they are working.
– Clinical Assistant Professor Emma Schiestl
As she was researching topics for her college honors thesis, she came across the idea that certain eating disorders could be better conceptualized as an addiction, which ultimately led her to the Food and Addictive Science & Treatment Lab as a graduate student. There she began to focus more on the contextual and environmental factors involved in eating disorders, such as childhood food insecurity or the way parental control during childhood can lead to binging behavior in young adulthood.
She anticipates returning to the topic at a later date, but for now, she looks forward to providing the foundations of clinical science to undergraduates, as well as higher-level clinical supervision and a skill acquisition course in which students develop the skills needed both to provide therapy and to evaluate community mental health programs.
On her off hours, Schiestl explores Bloomington’s outdoor spaces with a trail running group she joined on her arrival last summer and is actively getting to know the region.
Newly arrived Clinical Assistant Professor Natasha Hansen likewise brings an invaluable set of tools right to our doorstep. In fact, you could say that long before her sixteen years of explicit training, she had already begun to acquire a wealth of knowledge about the practice of clinical psychology, which she now generously and enthusiastically shares.
The daughter of a German mother and a Creole Cajun father who met living in India, Hansen grew up in Colorado, New Zealand, and Germany. While encountering people and places from three continents itself sparked an interest in psychology, it is also no accident that her father was a psychotherapist interested in mindfulness-based therapy, who traveled around the world leading trainings in this form of therapy and was an instructor of mindfulness-based therapeutic approaches at a Buddhist university, “long before mindfulness became hip.” She describes growing up in a milieu where “most of my parents’ adult friends, who would be over for dinner, would be talking about psychotherapy, especially mindfulness-based approaches.” Later on, as she charted her own course through the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience, Hansen would study and train in the delivery of empirically-supported mindfulness-based therapies, including mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and dialectical behavioral therapy.
It’s been a real privilege to learn from all of these different client populations and treatment experts.
– Clinical Assistant Professor Natasha Hansen
Hansen’s formal study of psychology and neuroscience began at Smith College, where she received her bachelor’s degree in psychology. She went on to three years of predoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. For two of those years, she worked in a psychiatric neuroimaging lab on a project to develop and disseminate protocols for identifying good-quality neuroimaging data. In her third year at the hospital, she became a clinical research coordinator at the Center for OCD and Related Disorders. There she worked on a number of clinical trials, helping to collect and analyze data, and take care of the many tasks that go into the organization of such intricate and long-term clinical research projects.
From there she began a dual Ph.D. program in clinical psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder, studying the mechanisms underlying different emotion regulation strategies and how those strategies interact with health-impacting behaviors, such as mindfulness practices and substance use. She worked on a large-scale clinical trial comparing two different evidence-based treatments for alcohol use disorder, a cognitive-behavioral therapy-based treatment and a mindfulness-based treatment. Her dissertation looked at the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying online mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy for depression, a project aimed at finding ways to increase access to care for what is now a leading cause of disability worldwide, at a time when access to high-quality care is too scarce to meet the rising need.
In the years during and immediately after graduate school, Hansen has worked with a variety of clinical populations. She worked in the Boulder community at a bipolar disorder clinic for underserved and low-income individuals with little or no access to health care – which she calls “an incredible and rewarding experience.” She completed her predoctoral clinical internship at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, working with Veterans. This involved working with individuals with severe mental illness, emotion dysregulation, suicidality, substance use, and self-harm behaviors using an intensive form of therapy as part of the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Team. She also worked in the Transgender Health Clinic at the San Francisco VA, as well as a Couples and Family Therapy Team. She then moved south to Palo Alto, CA, to complete a postdoctoral fellowship, dividing a year of intensive clinical practice in the hospital between working with the high-performance athletes on Stanford University’s Varsity Student-Athlete Treatment Team, and in the LGBTQ+ and PTSD clinics.
“It’s been a real privilege to learn from all of these different client populations and treatment experts,” she reflects.
She now stands ready to bring this training and experience to new generations of students, those who will be charting their own courses through the elusive, yet ever-expanding science of clinical psychology, where many urgent questions persist, and public health is in the balance.
LIZ ROSDEITCHER
Science Writer
The College of Arts