Master's Students Shine at Teacher's College Integrative Project Showcase
I am incredibly proud to announce the success of two Master’s students I sponsored and mentored, Aashree and Danielle (Dani), who recently completed their Masters in Clinical Psychology at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Their integrative projects were not only selected for the Teacher’s College Integrative Project showcase, but Aashree was also awarded 3rd place among all poster presentations!
Here is a brief summary of their outstanding projects:
Aashree
Title: Longitudinal Diagnostic Trajectory of Anxiety and Depression in Routine Psychiatric Care
This project took two very familiar diagnoses—anxiety and depression—and treated them as evolving clinical patterns rather than static categories. Instead of asking only which diagnosis a patient had, the project asked how those diagnoses changed over time in routine outpatient psychiatric care. By utilizing electronic health record (EHR) data, Aashree navigated the complexities of longitudinal tracking, requiring advanced methods like transition and time-to-event analyses.
The project has meaningful clinical implications. The findings suggest that diagnostic trajectories in real-world care may be more fluid than traditional categorical models often imply, emphasizing the importance of ongoing assessment and a willingness to revisit diagnostic formulations. It establishes a strong foundation for future research incorporating symptom-level data, showcasing the value of studying psychiatric care as it actually unfolds in practice.
Danielle (Dani)
Title: Barriers to Care: The Role of Demographics and Psychopathology in Appointment Non-Attendance
Missed appointments are easy to dismiss as a scheduling issue, but Danielle approached them as a meaningful marker of treatment engagement. Her project considered whether diagnostic complexity and broader patterns of psychopathology might help explain why some patients fall out of care, aligning with the goals of the Multidimensional Insights Into Neuropsychiatric Disorders (MIND) lab. Non-attendance affects continuity of care, symptom course, and the efficient use of limited outpatient resources.
Despite challenges such as a modest sample size and the integration of HiTOP-informed groupings, Dani’s preliminary findings move in a highly useful direction. The project involved careful decision-making and multiple analytic strategies, including negative binomial regression and survival analysis. The results point to the possibility that comorbidity and broader symptom groupings may identify patients at greater risk for missed visits, laying the groundwork for tailored outreach strategies and larger follow-up work in the PREDiCTOR study.
