Carla Mazefsky, PhD
University of Pittsburgh
Lab Website
About the Speaker: Carla Mazefsky is a licensed clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh. She completed her undergraduate training at The College of William and Mary, followed by a doctoral program in Clinical Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, pre-doctoral internship at Brown University, and post-doctoral fellowship at Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics. She first joined the University of Pittsburgh in 2006 as an Assistant Professor in Pediatrics at the Child Development Unit, where she spent half of her time doing autism diagnostic evaluations and half of her time doing research. She had her first grant during that time, focused on psychiatric diagnoses in autistic teenagers. She shifted into Psychiatry in 2009 and received an NICHD Career Development Award. She has been fully funded by and focused on research related to emotion dysregulation in autism ever since.
Most of Dr. Mazefsky’s research centers around understanding, assessing, and supporting emotion regulation in autism, with a particular focus on adolescence and adulthood. Early in her career, she received the Ritvo-Slifka Award for Innovation in Autism Research which provided the foundation for the early development of the Emotion Dysregulation Inventory, a questionnaire she authored and validated, that is now in use in six continents and almost 50 countries across the world. This instilled a passion in measure development, and she has continued to be involved in several other measure-related projects, most recently focused on suicide in autism. She also co-authored the Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement Program (EASE) with Drs. Kelly Beck, Susan White, and Caitlin Conner and was PI of a randomized controlled trial of EASE and is MPI of an upcoming comparative effectiveness trial of EASE in ten community mental health clinics (together with Dr. Susan White). She hopes that all of her work leads to improved mental health and quality of life for autistic people.
For Further Information, Contact: Clark Kellogg at kellogg@waisman.wisc.edu
The seminar series is funded by the John D. Wiley Conference Center Fund, the Friends of the Waisman Center and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) grant P50HD105353.
