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T32 Fellow

Postdoctoral Fellowship Start Date: 2022

Katie Lenger, Ph.D., completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, under the mentorship of Dr. Kristina Gordon. She completed her clinical psychology pre-doctoral internship at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University in 2021. She remained at Brown within the Clinical Psychology Program for her postdoctoral fellowship in Trauma Recovery.

Katie’s research examines the following:

  1. How can individual strengths (e.g., mindfulness) promote individual and relationship health?
  2. How these strengths may operate differently for under-resourced communities.
  3. How to increase intervention reach and efficacy among under-resourced communities to reduce health inequities.

For her dissertation, she sought to bring mindfulness to couples with low income as a skill to improve individual and relationship health. She received the Francisco J. Varela Award in 2016 and APA Dissertation Award in 2018, Katie worked with community partners to develop a brief, couple-based mindfulness intervention delivered to 39 couples with low income in the setting of their choice to improve access to care. 

This intervention effectively improved individual and relationship health up to 2-months post-intervention. In addition, Katie has continued to adapt this intervention for families and at-risk communities, such as women with post-partum depression. Katie is thrilled to return home to North Carolina, where she can further her contemplative research training within the Program on Integrative Medicine at UNC and serve North Carolinians. 

Katie’s Publications: 0000-0002-5115-1349