Sarah is a 6th year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology Program at Georgia State University, currently on internship at Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Prior to attending Georgia State, Sarah worked under the supervision of Drs. Kain, Chorney, and Fortier at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care. At UCI, Sarah assisted on projects that investigated social and cultural factors associated with children’s perioperative distress as well as managed a multi-site health care provider intervention aimed at reducing children’s preoperative anxiety.
Under the direction of Dr. Lindsey Cohen, Sarah has developed an applied research program that predominately examines social and contextual factors associated with pediatric pain outcomes and management. Sarah’s Master’s thesis employed advanced sequential analyses to examine parent-child interactions post-surgery and the resulting published manuscript was selected for the 2013 Diana Willis Award for Outstanding Article in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology. Her dissertation examined pain, aspects of social support, and stigma in adolescents hospitalized for sickle cell pain episodes. Throughout graduate school, Sarah has also been an international trainee member of Pain in Child Health (PICH), a Strategic Training Initiative in Health Research through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Clinically, Sarah received evidence-based practicum training opportunities working with a range of pediatric patient populations and received a Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) graduate fellowship aimed at providing clinical training with underrepresented populations in a pediatric setting.
