What is your current position and title?
I am a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Social Work and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in the Commonwealth of PA. I will be defending my dissertation on 4/12, though, so I should be a PhD pretty soon here.
What is your current research about?
My dissertation study focused on uncovering the temporal associations between objectively-measured digital technology use (i.e., social media, screen time) and psychosocial well-being, and identifying the potential mechanisms that explain these associations. Almost all the published longitudinal studies in this area have relied on flawed self-report measures of digital technology use, which undermines the reliability of results. So, to help fill this gap, I conducted a longitudinal study among young adults that leveraged iPhone digital trace data to obtain objective measures of digital technology use and tracked various aspects of psychosocial well-being over four months.
What projects do you having coming up in 2021?
This summer I will be starting a post-doctoral fellowship in the Innovative Methods in Pathogenesis and Child Treatment (IMPACT) program in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. During this fellowship, my focus will be on harnessing advancements in ambulatory assessment and computational modeling to further our ability to understand and predict suicidality among youth at high-risk for suicide. I will also be working on publishing the findings from my dissertation, which I believe have important implications for research in this area.
What advice would you give future graduate and professional students?
1.) Be kind; and 2.) Surround yourself with a team of kind people. Being in graduate school means that everyone around you is already very driven and very smart (including yourself). So if you select your team based on kindness, you'll get the best of both worlds and you will enjoy working with the people who you will be spending a lot of time with.