People

Dr. Thomas L. Rodebaugh, Ph.D.
Dr. Rodebaugh is a clinical psychologist with a focus on anxiety disorders in adults, particularly social anxiety disorder, as well as loneliness and social isolation. He is also interested in psychotherapy outcome and process. He has over one hundred publications, with most focusing on anxiety disorders. His research focuses on improving the assessment and treatment of anxiety, as well as increasing understanding of the factors that maintain and reduce anxiety (e.g., attention bias). He is particularly interested in the relationship between social anxiety and interpersonal processes, especially in regard to friendship and loneliness. More generally, he is interested in further evaluating and enhancing exposure treatment across the anxiety disorders. He has a long-standing interest in the selection of appropriate statistical models (e.g., structural equation models; item response theory models; network models) for evaluating measures and testing hypotheses. His recent work has focused more on social functioning generally.
Dr. Rodebaugh’s primary clinical focus is on supervising graduate students who provide psychotherapy at the department’s Psychological Services Center. Dr. Rodebaugh provides supervision in cognitive behavioral therapy and other empirically supported treatments. He is also the Director of Clinical Training for the Clinical Program.
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Madelyn Frumkin, B.A.
Madelyn Frumkin (B.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) entered graduate school in August, 2017. Before joining the Anxiety and Psychotherapy Laboratory, she spent two years working as a research coordinator at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders. Her primary project at MGH was an NIH-funded study comparing the efficacy of Kundalini yoga to Cognitive Behavior Therapy for individuals with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Currently, Madelyn is interested in the construct of emotional or psychological pain, especially as it relates to the co-occurence of anxiety disorders, depression, and chronic pain. She is also interested in using ecological momentary assessment tools to examine how the experience of physical pain interacts with emotional and psychological symptoms over time. In her spare time, Madelyn enjoys the great outdoors, cooking, and sitcoms.

Jason Grossman, B.S.
Jason Grossman (B.S., University of California, San Diego) entered graduate school in August, 2017. Before joining the Anxiety and Psychotherapy Laboratory, he spent seven years working as a staff research associate with the Integrated Substance Abuse Programs at the University of California, Los Angeles. While there, he worked on a number of studies involving criminal justice, cannabis cessation, and anxiety with comorbid substance use. Jason is interested in medication-enhanced treatment for social anxiety, examining the role of fear of positive evaluation in social situations, and the ways in which rumination interacts with anxiety broadly. He is also interested in utilizing ecological momentary assessment (EMA) paradigms focused around observable and intervenable traits of anxiety in natural settings. In his spare time, Jason enjoys hiking, cycling, and playing games of all sorts.

Marilyn L. Piccirillo, M.A.
Marilyn Piccirillo (B.A., Washington University in St. Louis; M.A., Temple University) entered graduate school in August 2013. Her research focuses on social anxiety disorder and comorbid disorders, especially depression. She is currently interested in how person-centered statistical methods can be used to model individual-level psychological processes and how these models could guide psychological treatment. She is also interested in using mobile technology to collect data for constructing these models. Her other research interests include understanding the impact of maladaptive cognitive-behavioral processes on interpersonal relationships, as well as examining the comorbidity of social anxiety, depression, and suicidality. In her free time, Marilyn loves spending time with the hipsters in hip coffeeshops, exploring St. Louis, and keeping houseplants alive.

Natasha Tonge, B.A
Natasha Tonge (B.A., Swarthmore college; M.A., Washington University in St. Louis) entered graduate school in August, 2013. Before joining the Anxiety and Psychotherapy Laboratory, she spent two years working as a research assistant with the Center for Autism Research at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. While there, she primarily worked on studies using computer-based behavioral measures, eye-tracking and self-report measures to quantify individual differences in social motivation. Currently, Natasha is interested in using EMA (ecological momentary assessment) tools to measure how anxious traits change over time, and she is also interested in studying social impairment across psychological disorders. In her spare time she enjoys reading, illustration, video games, board games and fencing.

Jaclyn S. Weisman, M.A.
Jaclyn Weisman (B.A., Northwestern University; M.A., Washington University in St. Louis) entered graduate school in August, 2012. Her research interests include cognitive and behavioral processes in the etiology, maintenance, and treatment of anxiety disorders. Specifically, she is interested in the diminished positive affect that characterizes social anxiety disorder and comorbid conditions such as major depressive disorder. In the future, she hopes to develop interventions aimed at increasing positive affect and enhancing the efficacy of exposure. Presently, Jaclyn is working on a study examining the relationship between goal types and content and participant performance and experience during a public speaking task. Additionally, she is a collaborator on a review paper examining social anxiety disorder from a life-course perspective and a paper examining the trajectories of positive and negative affect in a community sample of hip fracture patients. In her free time, Jaclyn enjoys working out, cooking, dancing, and cheering on Boston sports teams.
Jaclyn is completing her clinical internship at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine for the 2017-2018 year.