People

Dr. Calvocoressi was the first researcher to measure family accommodation in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Family accommodation involves a set of family responses to patient symptoms that have been associated with poor treatment outcomes. The Family Accommodation Scales, developed by Dr. Calvocoressi and colleagues, have been translated into multiple languages and are used worldwide in research and clinical practice. Dr. Calvocoressi is currently overseeing a large psychometric study of the self-rated version of the scale. She and her colleagues are also developing a measure to examine relatives' motivations for engaging in accommodating behaviors.

Dr. Calvocoressi also conducts research in cancer epidemiology and in psychosocial epidemiology. She has collaborated on studies examining the impact of genetic and environmental factors on the development of meningiomas, and on studies examining factors associated with prostate cancer severity. She has also investigated factors influencing mammography screening in diverse populations. She is currently collaborating on an FDA-funded project focused on promoting clinical trial participation among racial and ethnic minorities.

Dr. Calvocoressi co-teaches the graduate biostatistics capstone course, Statistical Practice. And, she is the director of the Young Scholars Program and Internship in Biostatistics and Clinical Research, a program for gifted and talented high school students.

Martha J. Falkenstein, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Research for the Office of Clinical Assessment and Research (OCAR) at the OCD Institute at McLean Hospital. Her research focuses on investigating mediators and moderators of treatment response, and developing novel treatments for obsessive compulsive related disorders (OCRD). She has conducted research about accommodation of symptoms of trichotillomania, and is currently studying accommodation in adults with treatment-refractory OCD. Dr. Falkenstein has received funding from NIMH, the International OCD Foundation, and Harvard Medical School (Kaplen Fellowship and Livingston Award) to support this work.

Currently, Dr. Falkenstein is principal investigator on a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Career Development (K23) Award testing a novel method of augmenting exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy with a smartphone-based intervention targeting cognitive biases, utilizing machine learning to develop personalized predictions of which individuals may best respond.

Dr. Kuckertz, is a clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on mechanisms of exposure therapy (how and why this treatment produces optimal clinical outcomes), with a particular interest in longitudinal measurement of mechanisms and outcomes in real-world settings. She has also conducted extensive research in the area of cognitive bias modification for OCD and anxiety disorders, and her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. Clinically, Dr. Kuckertz works with children, teens, and young adults with OCD and is especially interested in involving parents and other family members in the treatment process.

Professor Lebowitz studies and treats childhood and adolescent anxiety and is Director of the Program for Anxiety Disorders at the Yale Child Study Center. His research focuses on the development, neurobiology, and treatment of anxiety and related disorders, with special emphasis on cross-generational and familial influences in these disorders. Dr. Lebowitz is the lead investigator on multiple funded research projects, and is the author of numerous research papers and of books and chapters on childhood and adolescent anxiety. He is also the father of three great boys.

Monica Wu, Ph.D. is currently a Senior Clinical Product Manager at Lyra Health, where she leads the clinical development of evidence-based blended care programs for youth and families and conducts program evaluation research. She previously served on faculty in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Her research and clinical interests lie in investigating factors that may predict and/or augment treatment response in anxiety disorders and OCD, as well as examining the role families play in the therapeutic process. Specifically, she has a keen interest in the phenomenon of family accommodation (FA); her FA-related work has been published in Clinical Psychology Review and Psychological Assessment, researching the assessment, phenomenology, and clinical correlates of FA. Future directions of interest involve technology-enhanced adjuncts to treatment to target FA, as well as better understanding factors that may impact the frequency and presentation of FA. Dr. Wu participated in adapting the Family Accommodation Scale Self-Rated (FAS-SR) for OCD patient use to create the Family Accommodation Patient Version (FAS-PV); she spearheaded the examination of the psychometric properties of the adapted instrument.