Director

Carla Sharp

Carla Sharp, Ph.D. is the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Houston and Associate Dean for Faculty and Research. She also directs the Adolescent Diagnosis Assessment Prevention and Treatment Center and the Developmental Psychopathology Lab at the University of Houston. Her work has significantly advanced the scientific understanding of the phenomenology, causes, correlates and treatment of personality and pathology in youth. Her work makes use of mentalization-based framework to understand, prevent and treat personality and pathology in young people. She is the recipient of the 2016 Mid-career award, North American Society for the Study of Personality Disorders and the 2018 Award for Achievement in the Field of Severe Personality Disorders from the Personality Disorders Institute in New York. She is the current Associate Editor for APA journal Personality Disorders: Theory, Research and Treatment, and a workgroup member for updating the American Psychiatric Association practice guidelines for BPD. She has published over 300 peer-reviewed publications in addition to numerous chapters and books with an h-index of 65. She is the lead author on Building resilience: the Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers (Routledge, 2022), and the forthcoming book Mentalizing in psychotherapy: A guide for practitioners (Wiley, 2022).  Her work has been funded by the NICHD, NIAAA, NIMH, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and other foundations.

Lab Manager

Estefania Fernandez

Estefania is the Lab Manager for the Developmental Psychopathology lab at the University of Houston. She graduated in May 2021 with a Bachelors of Science in Psychology and a Bachelors of Arts in Spanish. She joined the lab in January 2020 and her research interests include the mental health of minorities, especially Latinos, and personality disorders in children and adolescents

Assistant Lab Director

Sophie Kerr

Sophie is a fifth-year doctoral student in the Developmental Psychopathology Lab. After graduating from Dartmouth College in 2017, she spent two years working as a research assistant and diagnostic interviewer with the Methods to Improve Diagnostic Assessment and Services (MIDAS) Project at Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital. She is interested in caregiving factors related to the development of psychopathology and interventions that aim to interrupt intergenerational transmission of psychopathology. In particular, her work has focused on families with personality pathology and families impacted by the incarceration of a parent. Her master’s thesis examined relations between maternal borderline personality disorder features and parenting behaviors during in-vivo conflict discussions with adolescent offspring using the Observing Mediational Interactions (OMI) coding system from the Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers (MISC). For her dissertation, which has been funded by an NICHD F31 fellowship, she is evaluating the feasibility and acceptability of MISC for Black and Hispanic formerly incarcerated mothers.

Clinical Psychology Graduate Students

Kiran Boone

Kiran is a first-year doctoral student in the Developmental Psychopathology Lab. After earning her B.A. in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) in 2022, she worked in the Early Emotional Development Program at WashU as a research assistant for one year. During that time she worked on several developmental psychopathology studies and became more interested in the development of personality pathology. Kiran is interested in better characterizing trajectories of personality pathology and healthy personality development across childhood and adolescence, in order to discover more protective and promotive factors that can be fostered to support well-being in young people. 

Madeleine Allman

Madeleine is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Developmental Psychopathology Lab. Madeleine earned her B.S. in Psychology and Public Health from Tulane University in 2016 and her Masters of Public Health in Epidemiology from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in 2017. After graduating, she came to Houston to work in global health research at Baylor College of Medicine. Madeleine is interested in caregiver-child relationships, especially how they are impacted by exposure to trauma and interventions that address the impact of adversity in caregiver child relationships. Madeleine recently defended her masters thesis analyzing the impact of the Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers (MISC) on Social Cognition among Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) in South Africa. She is also working on her dissertation project focusing on MISC’s implementation in the context of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). Madeleine is also interested in the assessment and treatment of emotional and behavioral disorders in children and adolescents. 

Kennedy Balzen

Kennedy is a second-year doctoral student in the Developmental Psychopathology Lab. She earned her B.S. in Psychology with a minor in Neuroscience from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2020. After graduating, she worked at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center as a research coordinator on several studies investigating suicide prevention and depression in youth. Kennedy is interested in research that aims to refine the dimensional conceptualization of personality pathology. Particularly, she is interested in research on the Alternative Model for Personality Disorders (AMPD), with a focus on the measurement of Criterion A and the utility of narrative identity for identifying personality pathology.
 

Bree Cervantes

Bree is a third-year doctoral student in the Developmental Psychopathology Lab. She earned her B.A. in Psychology and Social Behavior from the University of California, Irvine in 2018. After graduating, Bree spent three years as a research coordinator on several studies implementing attachment-based and parenting interventions. Bree is interested in examining the impact of attachment, parenting, and caregiving factors (e.g., reflective functioning, psychopathology) on youth psychopathology. Her master’s thesis examines the relationship between maternal reflective functioning and youth personality pathology using the Parent Development Interview (PDI) coding system.
 

Tess Gecha

Tess is a second-year doctoral student in the Developmental Psychopathology lab. In 2020, she earned her B.A. in Psychology from Georgetown University. After graduating, she moved to Boston to work as a research assistant at McLean Hospital, assisting with two drug studies for borderline personality disorder (BPD), a mentalization group therapy study, and a study looking at suicidality in the offspring of adults with BPD. Tess is interested in exploring the impact that a BPD diagnosis of a family member has on the entire family unit and working toward improving existing mentalization-based interventions that work with parents with BPD, hoping to increasingly incorporate fathers in the process.
 

Students Currently on Internship

Kiana Cano

Ronnie McLaren

Eric Sumlin 

DPL Alumni

Francesca Penner, Ph.D.

Salome Vanwoerden, Ph.D.

Claire Hatkevich, Ph.D

Allison Kalpakci, Ph.D.

Will Mellick, Ph.D.

Carolyn Ha, Ph.D.

Tyson Reuter, Ph.D.

Amanda Venta, Ph.D.

Elizabeth Ross, Ph.D.

Robert Seals, Ph.D.

Heather Pane, Ph.D.

Kelly Green, Ph.D.

Stephanie Kovacs, Ph.D.

Teona Amble, Ph.D.

Ilya Yaroslavlsky, Ph.D.

Dan Mortenson, Ph.D.

Research Assistants

Nabeeha Asim

Nabeeha graduated from the University of Houston in 2021 with a B.A. in Psychology and minors in Medicine and Society and Human Resource Management. She joined the lab in May 2018 as a research assistant and is also a project coordinator with the Emotions in Marriage Lab. Her research interests include interpersonal functioning, emotion regulation, and high-risk behaviors within the context of borderline personality disorder. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology.

Estefania Fernandez

Estefania is a post-bacc research assistant at the University of Houston. She graduated in May 2021 with a Bachelors of Science in Psychology and a Bachelors of Arts in Spanish. She joined the lab in January 2020 and her research interests include the mental health of minorities, especially Latinos, and personality disorders in children and adolescents

Teresa Sanchez

Teresa Sanchez joined the lab in January 2022 as an undergraduate student pursuing a B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Health and in Spanish. She is interested in human development and personality disorders especially through a sociocultural perspective. Teresa aspires to pursue a graduate degree in Clinical Psychology to further embark on her studies and wishes to make a purposeful impact in the field. 

Zane Shamsher

Zane is a fourth-year undergraduate at the University of Houston pursuing a B.S. in Psychology and a minor in Biology. He joined the lab in the Spring of 2021 as an undergraduate research assistant. Zane’s research interests include understanding psychopathology in children and adolescents, the neurological basis of empathy, and understanding neurogenesis of mirror neurons. He plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Clinical Neuropsychology.