SEPI Dissertation Award

Heather Muir is a sixth-year graduate student in Clinical Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). At UMass, her master’s thesis examined the impact of integrating of motivational interviewing with CBT on interpersonal outcomes for generalized anxiety disorder. Additional projects have focused on routine outcomes monitoring in therapy, patient treatment expectations, and context responsive psychotherapy integration. This work has been disseminated at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed publications. Her dissertation centers on therapist personal and professional humility as a predictor of therapist differences in effectiveness. Heather is currently on her predoctoral internship at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts Mental Health Center/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. More specifically, she is on the Psychosis Across the Lifespan track working with patients with severe mental illness.

The SEPI 2020 winner of the dissertation award is Alice Coyne. Her dissertation was entitled Therapist level moderation of within- and between-therapist process-outcome associations. Her supervisor Michael Constantino waxes rhapsodic about Alice, and rightly so. She has accomplished her PhD at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and now is thriving at her first choice predoctoral internship at the Charleston Consortium. She is a highly accomplished student with many publications to her name already, and is simply the best student Dr. Constanino ‘has every had’ as an academic at Amherst. He expressed confidence in Alice’s future and believes strongly she will make field-changing contributions to the psychotherapy integration. What else could we want in a dissertation winner? She clearly will publish this recent dissertation in which she examined how outcomes could be predicted from both patients’ and therapists’ converging perspectives on their alliance quality. Her work treats therapy relationships as true dyadic constructs, and models these with cutting-edge statistics. A gifted statistician she assesses factors across multiple levels of analysis. It is easy to confuse Alice for a colleague and she surely will be one soon. Modest and lovely, Alice briefly presented her work at our online annual SEPI meeting this year in Jun 2021. We congratulate her! She is so deserving of this award.

The 2019 winner of the dissertation award is Henry Xiao, M.S. Henry is currently a graduate of the Pennsylvania State University clinical psychology doctoral program (mentor and nominator, Louis G. Castonguay, Ph.D.), and is completing his internship at the Counseling and Psychological Services of Penn State, where he was also accepted for a post-doctoral position. His dissertation title is “Re-Evaluating Dropout: Exploring Definitions and Therapist Effects” and focuses on the impacts of operationalization of dropout on research findings. Using national data from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health practice research network, Henry independently devised a project to build upon and expand existing literature on dropout from therapy by empirically examining the differential rates of dropout using three distinct definitions of dropout researched within the field. Additionally, he examined the level of therapist effects between definitions to thoroughly compare and contrast these definitions. Henry has demonstrated extraordinary collaborative spirit and we have no doubt that he will continue to make a substantial impact on psychotherapy integration.

Currently completing his Clinical Psychology Ph.D. at the University of Windsor.

Graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst doctoral program and is a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University.

Ph.D. candidate, York University, Canada