Where you are now working and what is your role?
I am currently a Professor in the Psychology Department at the Munroe-Meyer Institute (MMI) at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. My professional areas of expertise include behavior management for children and adolescents with behavioral challenges and attention deficits, academic assessment and intervention for children and adolescents with academic challenges, professional development and instructional coaching for adults who teach and support children, parent training, school-based consultation, family engagement, and strengthening positive home-school partnerships. My current clinical practice through MMI is situated in OPS schools, providing school psychological services, including school-based consultation. I also am Project Co-Director for the Carolina Family Engagement Center, housed in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina, and funded through a grant by the U.S. Department of Education.
Tell us about your path to becoming a psychologist / academician / researcher.
I received my PhD in Psychology at Louisiana State University in the School Psychology program, and I am a licensed psychologist in Nebraska for children and adolescents. Throughout my career, I have provided behavioral health services through private practice in rural, urban, and suburban areas, while holding faculty positions at medical centers and institutions of higher education.
From the time I was a child in a suburban area near New Orleans, Louisiana, I always found joy in helping others, especially other children, and in making life better for adults and children with whom I lived, played, and worked. I had always wanted to be a teacher (even “tutoring” my grandpa and “playing school” with my younger cousins). However, when I was in eighth grade, my mom (who had been a teacher) knew that I had a desire to go beyond what the four walls of a classroom typically allow. She introduced me to the realm of child psychology that would allow me to be able to have a profound impact on enhancing the lives of individual children and their families. My career goal was to make the life of a child and that child’s family better off when they left me than when they met me.
As I set my sights on clinical psychology, I majored in psychology at LSU, graduated, and applied to clinical child psychology graduate programs. When my GRE scores were not high enough for admission into those top-notch programs, I was encouraged to apply for the school psychology program at LSU. That was the first of a few “alternatives” in my path that became one of those “happy accidents” in my life! I graduated with my PhD from LSU in psychology, came to Nebraska for internship at MMI through the NICPP, and started my faculty career at MMI.
Over the next 20 years, I had the privilege of returning to my Louisiana roots as faculty at the LSU Health Science Center; being instrumental in helping to develop the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools (CYFS) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; launching an interdisciplinary research institute in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina; being an independent consultant with several universities; and now returning to my professional “home” at MMI Psychology. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the amazing family with whom God has blessed me, my dedicated teachers from early on through my college instructors and internship supervisors who had a profound and foundational impact on my career, and the support of my wonderful husband and my life-long friends. I am glad to be able to be at this stage of my career in which I can “give back” to my colleagues and invest in the next generation of professionals. I can only hope to contribute half as much as I have received throughout my lifetime.
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