Team Members

Director

Carlo C. DiClemente, Ph.D.

Carlo DiClemente completed his doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Rhode Island in 1978. He joined the faculty at UMBC as Professor of Psychology and Department Chair in 1995 after several years as an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston and at the University of Texas Medical School and the Texas Research Institute of Mental Sciences. Dr. DiClemente's research examines the stages of the process of human intentional behavior change particularly as related to health and addictive behaviors. He is the co-developer of the Transtheoretical Model of change which has been used by researchers in the areas of cancer prevention, HIV risk reduction, dietary change, exercise, occupational safety, and rehabilitation of health and addictive behaviors. He has co-authored several books, The Transtheoretical Model and Changing for Good as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Dr. DiClemente serves as a consultant to a number of institutions and research projects and has an active grant funded program of research in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Maryland at Baltimore and at University of Maryland College Park, University of Texas Health Sciences Center, University of Houston and other institutions.

E-mail: diclemen@umbc.edu More details...

Associate Director of MDQuit

Janine Delahanty, Ph.D.

Janine Delahanty is a Research Scientist.  Dr. Delahanty is the Associate Director of the Maryland Quitting Use and Initiation of Tobacco (MDQuit) Resource Center (visit www.mdquit.org for more information) and is also the Program Evaluator of a 5 year SAMHSA / CSAT medical residency training grant for Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment.  She graduated in May of 2005 with a degree in Human Services Psychology (Behavioral Medicine Track) from UMBC.  Her interests include: substance use prevention and cessation, with an emphasis on smoking and other illicit drug use among adolescents.

E-mail: delahan1@umbc.edu

Graduate Students

Taylor Berens, B.S.

Taylor is a first year graduate student in the in the Clinical/Behavioral Medicine track of the Human Services Psychology program at UMBC. She received her B.S. in Psychology and Spanish from Virginia Tech in 2010, where she worked in the Addictions Laboratory and conducted research on the efficacy of personalized normative interventions to reduce drinking behaviors and misperceptions in heavy drinking college students. She then worked at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of Medicine in the Office of Assessment and Evaluation Studies, where she was involved in program evaluation, assessment studies, and research design; in particular, she worked on a project that evaluated the teaching and assessment methods around tobacco cessation education in Virginia medical schools. She is interested in studying how various constructs influence health behavior change, particularly for tobacco and alcohol users. She is currently working on MD3 (Maryland MDs Making a Difference).

E-mail: tberens1@umbc.edu

Michele Crisafulli, B.A.

Michele is a first year graduate student in the Clinical Psychology/Community and Applied Social Psychology track of the Human Services Psychology doctoral program at UMBC. She received a Bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007 and a Master's degree in psychology from Boston University in 2008. While at UNC and BU, Michele studied eating disorders, with a particular emphasis on understanding the stigma associated with them. From 2009 to 2011, Michele worked as a research assistant in the Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse at McLean Hospital, on a project examining gender-specific treatment for substance use disorders. At UMBC, Michele is a graduate assistant with the Maryland Resource Center for Quitting Use and Initiation of Tobacco (MDQuit). She is especially interested in the prevention of substance abuse and co-occurring disorders, as well as the promotion of positive health behaviors.

E-mail: mcris1@umbc.edu

Michael Earley, M.Ed.

Michael is a fourth year graduate student in the Human Services Psychology Program at UMBC. Michael received his BA in English from the University of Notre Dame in 2000 and completed his M.Ed. in 2002. Michael returned to graduate school after five years of high school teaching and three years of work in addiction, anxiety, and mood disorder research. Michael is interested in exploring how the principles of the TMM, motivational interviewing, and treatment tailoring can be utilized to improve the efficacy of acceptance and mindfulness based interventions.

E-mail: earley1@umbc.edu

Miranda Garay Kofeldt, M.A.

Miranda Garay Kofeldt is currently employed at the University of Maryland College Park as the Assistant Director of Clinical Training and a Lecturer in the Clinical Psychology Graduate Program. She completed her pre-doctoral internship at the Baltimore VAMHCS/University of Maryland Medical Center Consortium in a University of Maryland Medical Center Adult Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic. She is ABD in the Clinical/Behavioral Medicine track of the Human Services Psychology program at UMBC. While in the HABITS Lab, she served as the lab coordinator and an MDQuit Center Specialist, and was actively involved in many of the ongoing lab projects. Her Master's Thesis was entitled “Predictors of alcohol use and alcohol-related problems in college women: Affect dysregulation and alcohol expectancies”. Her dissertation is examining self-regulatory factors related to college student gambling and gambling-related problems.

E-mail: miranda5@umbc.edu

Preston Greene, M.A.

Preston is a sixth year graduate student in the Clinical/Behavioral Medicine track of the Human Services Psychology program at UMBC. He received his B.S. in Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005, where he was involved in research focusing on the following areas: the relationship between community violence exposure, adolescent substance use, and coping mechanisms; and promoting healthy pregnancies among substance using women. For his Master's thesis, Preston examined within treatment changes in drinking, self-efficacy, and use of the processes of change using Latent Growth Modeling (LGM) in 2010. Preston is currently working on his dissertation titled "How and When Implicit Attitudes About Smoking Affect Decision Making in the Personal Process of Smoking Cessation." He is currently working as a resource center specialist at the Maryland Resource Center for Quitting Use & Initiation of Tobacco (MDQuit).

E-mail: greenep1@umbc.edu

Angela Petersen, B.A.

Angela is a third year graduate student in the Clinical/Behavioral Medicine track of the Human Services Psychology program at UMBC. She received a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Montana in 2007 where she participated in research focused on etiology of substance use disorders, substance abuse in sexual minority groups, and co-occurring disorders. She is currently working as a resource center specialist at the Maryland Resource Center for Quitting Use & Initiation of Tobacco (MDQuit). Angela is interested in researching TTM constructs and psychological distress in populations with co-occurring disorders as well as how treatment variables such as the therapeutic alliance affect treatment outcomes for alcohol dependence.

E-mail: angel13@umbc.edu

Kristina Schumann, M.A.

Kris is a fifth year graduate student in the Clinical/Behavioral Medicine track of the Human Services Psychology program at UMBC. She received a Bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Connecticut in 2002 and a Master's degree in psychology from American University in 2006. In the HABITS lab, Kris coordinated Project ACTION; a project exploring personal change mechanisms in modifying drinking behavior. Kris currently works as a lifestyle interventionist on a research study at Johns Hopkins called Project DECIDE, which is a problem-solving training intervention for African Americans with type 2 diabetes aimed at improving glycemic control and cardiovascular health. She is currently working on her dissertation, entitled: Diabetes Self-Efficacy Survey: Measure development and implications for self-management of type 2 diabetes.

E-mail:kschu1@umbc.edu

Shayla Thrash, B.S.

Shayla is a second year graduate student in the in the Clinical/Behavioral Medicine track of the Human Services Psychology program at UMBC. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Michigan State University in 2010, where she conducted research on motivation to change health behaviors among college students (specifically, smoking cessation and dietary change). Shayla is interested in studying health behavior change as it pertains to addictive behaviors, obesity, and eating disorders.

Email: sthrash1@umbc.edu

Onna Van Orden, M.A.

Onna is a sixth year graduate student in the Clinical Psychology/Behavioral Medicine track of the Human Services Psychology doctoral program at UMBC. She received a Bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Florida in 2005. Onna is currently a graduate research assistant with both the HIV/AIDS Community Collaborative project funded by the Maryland Infectious Diseases and Environmental Health Administration and the MDQuit Resource Center for Quitting Use and Initiation of Tobacco funded by DHMH. Her master's thesis research concerned differences between daily and nondaily smoking college students on variables associated with the Transtheoretical Model of Intentional Behavior Change. Her dissertation research focuses on event-level factors and processes of change related to alcohol abuse and risky sexual behavior among HIV+ men who have sex with men in the Positive Choices study (NIAAA Grant R01 AA11808: Jeffrey T. Parsons, principal investigator; Joseph P. Carbonari, co-principal investigator).

E-mail: onnav1@umbc.edu

Katherine Wright, B.A.

Katie is a fourth year graduate student in the Clinical/Behavioral Medicine track of the Human Services Psychology program at UMBC.  She received a Bachelor's degree in Neuroscience from Middlebury College in 2004.  In the four years before graduate school, she worked in learning, memory, and emotion research at a neuropsychology lab in the NIMH and later, worked in schizophrenia and addiction research, coordinating collaborative projects between the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and NIDA.  Now she works as a graduate research assistant on the MarylanD M.D.s Making a Difference (MD3) project.  She is focusing on the link between self-efficacy and impulsivity in the prediction of drinking and consequences related to drinking for her master’s thesis research.

E-mail: wright6@umbc.edu 

For information about HABITS Dissertations and Theses, please click here.