The Department of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame has hired six new faculty members this year, a significant expansion of a field that is core to the University’s commitment to fighting the U.S. mental health crisis.

The new assistant professors — Ryan Carpenter, Haya Fatimah, Kaylin Hill, Matthew Robison, Elizabeth Shewark, and Ivan Vargas — will further research in their subfields of cognitive, behavioral, clinical, and developmental psychology. Their scholarly work will aim to address the psychological causes and effects of various issues such as trauma, self-harm, sleep disorders, and substance use disorder.

"The addition of six new faculty members to a single department in one year is a rare and transformative event,” said James Brockmole, professor of psychology and chair of the department. “By recruiting these outstanding young scholars to Notre Dame, we have significantly expanded the questions we can ask about a wide range of mental phenomena, the methods that we can use to derive answers to those questions, and the educational opportunities that we can offer to our undergraduate and graduate students."

Four of the new faculty are clinical psychologists and will conduct research at the new Veldman Family Psychology Clinic, which breaks ground at 501 N. Hill Street in South Bend’s East Bank neighborhood on Sept. 20 and is expected to be completed in 2026. The 36,000-square-foot facility is the first piece of Notre Dame’s $68 million commitment to improving mental health on campus, in the South Bend community, and across the nation.

Once at full capacity, it aim to serve more than 1,500 people in the South Bend community annually through mental health assessment, intervention, and prevention services, and will be home to faculty and graduate students developing scalable, evidence-based solutions that address childhood trauma, substance use, and other mental health concerns.

Understanding where substance use disorder begins

In his research, clinical psychologist Ryan Carpenter focuses on understanding substance use in the everyday lives of everyday people.

To examine alcohol and opioid use, Carpenter uses technologies such as smartphones and portable breathalyzers to understand what occurs in people’s lives that ultimately triggers their decision to imbibe in addictive substances. In his lab, he is also interested in testing if mobile health interventions, such as smartphone apps, can be helpful to people trying to address their substance use.

“To improve treatment options, there is a critical need to better understand why some people can use substances largely without issue, while others develop significant problems,” he said.

Carpenter, who was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University and most recently was an assistant professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, currently has two projects funded by the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse to develop and tailor behavioral interventions to address the co-use of alcohol and opioids in young adults and to help people who are drinking alcohol while in treatment for opioid use.

While at Notre Dame, Carpenter said he’s looking forward to collaborating with his colleagues and to making lasting relationships with South Bend community partners. He said the development of the Veldman Family Psychology Clinic will also provide critical infrastructure for both conducting substance use research and providing treatment services in the community.

“A major draw of Notre Dame for me is the opportunity to be around so many people studying so many important and interesting research questions,” he said. “It’s energizing and I’m looking forward to building new collaborations here across the department, College, and University, as well as the broader Michiana community.”

Predicting self-harm tendencies

Clinical psychologist Haya Fatimah studies complex dynamics in psychopathology, especially those with borderline personality and comorbid disorders.

Fatimah received her Ph.D. from the University of South Florida and completed a postdoctoral clinical internship at McLean Hospital with Harvard Medical School. She is particularly interested in predicting factors and behaviors that are aligned with borderline personality disorder such as suicide, non-suicidal injury, and substance use. She is currently studying the complex dynamics underlying non-suicidal self-injury in youth, with the goal of identifying critical windows of risk to inform prevention and treatment efforts.

Fatimah’s goal at Notre Dame in this research is to develop personalized treatment with a dynamic systems approach to understand personality pathology and focus on risk factors and processes at the level of a single individual.

“I am especially interested in how personality pathology emerges, and what we can do about it,” she said.

Lifting the burden of depression

Kaylin Hill finds that emotional experiences are at the heart of what is important to us.

Originally from the South Bend-area, Hill received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Purdue University. She studied psychophysiological assessment, in particular using electroencephalogram as an assessment tool in understanding emotions, as well as other neural processes like reward and error-monitoring.

“I continued to pursue these questions related to understanding emotions broadly and depression more specifically, and as I began to understand more of what these processes look like in adults, I began to ask more questions about how they developed,” she said.

She continued her analysis during a postdoctoral appointment in developmental psychopathology at Vanderbilt University. Hill’s current research focuses on how to better characterize depression symptoms, refine psychophysiological assessment for individuals, and identify both individual and contextual risk processes with a focus toward intervention.

“As a clinical psychologist, the ultimate aim of my work is to reduce the tremendous burden of depression on individuals and families,” she said.

As part of that, Hill is creating the Psychophysiology of Affect across the Lifespan (PAL) Lab at Notre Dame, where the aim will be to examine emotion and social processes related to depression and the risk of depression in individuals and families.

“I am excited to work alongside my esteemed colleagues, to teach and mentor such wonderful students, and especially to contribute to the growing neuroscience area and to work with the community through the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families,” Hill said. “Additionally, working on campus means that I get to re-visit nostalgic experiences from when I was kid, and I am thrilled to offer the same experiences to my children alongside their grandparents.”

The challenge of attention retention

As a cognitive psychologist, Matthew Robison aims to answer questions regarding attentiveness — how are some people able to control and sustain their attention, while others struggle? Why do people feel alert in some moments, but not in others? How do lifestyle factors like sleep, mood, and exercise affect cognitive function?

“Attention seems to be one of the core cognitive skills that leads us to success in a variety of mental endeavors,” Robison said. “However, we also know that controlling and sustaining attention is difficult, particularly for some people, and doing so for a long period of time can produce mental strain and fatigue.”

Through his research, Robison addresses three key points — identifying psychological factors that might cause a person to be inattentive and distracted, recognizing when keeping attention causes stress and fatigue, and answering if a person can improve their attention through training exercises.

Robison received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon, then was a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. A Notre Dame alumnus, he said his return as a faculty member was once a distant dream that has now come true.

“I am excited to collaborate with the wonderful faculty we have in the department and all across campus,” he said. “I’m eager to mentor graduate students to be excellent psychological scientists in this vibrant and rigorous academic environment, to teach and train our undergraduate students in psychological science, and to actively participate in the on-campus and greater South Bend community both through my research and in many other ways.”

Resilience in childhood trauma development

As an undergraduate, Elizabeth Shewark found herself becoming increasingly interested in the motivations behind people's behavior, taking courses in developmental psychology that covered everything from the prenatal period to aging and death.

“I was hooked,” she said. “Change is life. How lucky are we that we get to change over time — that we get to explore all these different versions of ourselves over the course of our lifespan?”

Now, as a developmental psychologist at Notre Dame, Shewark’s research goal is to examine children’s resilience development within their social systems, such as families, schools, and neighborhoods. She examines this by applying cutting-edge research and statistical methods to illuminate the biological and environmental impacts on child development.

She’s further applied this research interest, with support from a National Institutes of Health Pathway to Independence award, toward children who face trauma and adversity through poverty and exposure to community violence.

Shewark received her Ph.D. from Penn State University and was inspired to come to Notre Dame after visiting with psychology faculty member Laura Miller-Graff and the psychology department, as well as attending the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society’s Health Equity Data Forum.

“I kept thinking how amazing it would be to work here, with these brilliant individuals and at a University that asks, ‘how can we help,’” she said. “I am incredibly honored to have joined such a thoughtful, innovative, and service-oriented community of scholars where I feel like I can have an impact. I look forward to building connections both within the University and in the surrounding communities to advance healthy development for all.”

Insomnia’s impact on health

Sleep can occupy a third of one’s life, yet little is known about it. Ivan Vargas’ research aims to better understand insomnia and its effects on overall health.

“One idea I hope people can take away from the work that I do is that insomnia is not only bad for your sleep, it's also bad for your health,” he said. “Insomnia affects a lot of people every day and we often overlook the negative consequences it can have on our overall mental and physical health.”

Vargas received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program and the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He was most recently an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas.

His work includes a number of projects that evaluate behavioral interventions for sleep, such as cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. His research is currently supported by a National Institutes of Health career development award funded by the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute.

Vargas also received his bachelor’s degree from Notre Dame and said he’s excited to see the University’s increased commitment to identifying solutions to address the mental health crisis.

“I look forward to the opportunities that this will provide to our department,” he said. “My hope is that in my time here at Notre Dame, we can expand the knowledge and resources that are available for people struggling with insomnia and related sleep problems.”

Originally published by Mary Kinney at al.nd.edu on September 25, 2024.