As the Eating Disorder Services Coordinator at University Counseling Service, I work to support students presenting with eating disorders, disordered eating concerns, and/or body image issues. I work closely as a part of the UI Eating Disorder Network with fellow EDN providers at Student Health and Student Wellness to ensure students receive collaborative therapeutic, physical, dietetic, and fitness/movement care as appropriate for body image and eating disorder issues. I also serve as a consultant to UCS staff around eating disorder and body image issues as needed. I work to maintain up-to-date information about eating disorder care in the community, as well as liaising with community providers as needed. I also work with campus partners, community organizations, and relevant UI student groups to organize and promote outreach and prevention services related to body image and eating disorders. My goal as the Eating Disorder Services Coordinator is to reduce stigma around eating disorder and body image issues, increase access to multidisciplinary eating disorder care for students, and work to provide outreach, education, and prevention in this area.

Clinical interests

As a therapist, I conceptualize and practice primarily from a psychodynamic lens and consider therapy to be a collaborative process between myself and the client. I often incorporate elements of CBT and DBT and utilize overarching feminist and multicultural perspectives in my work. My clinical interests include eating disorders, eating concerns, and body image issues, as well as working with survivors of trauma. I also have an interest and experience in working with clients who have specifically experienced rape, sexual assault, or sexual trauma, as well as with clients who have experienced both trauma and body image or eating disorder issues. I am trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing) in both individual therapy & group therapy contexts for trauma processing. Additionally, I enjoy working with clients with many different presenting concerns, including depression, anxiety, interpersonal/relational issues, and transitional/stage of life issues.

Multicultural interests

I believe therapy can be an effective space to help clients process systemic, societal, and interpersonal impacts and the ways these systems may interact with their individual identities. I also work to be aware of the inherent power differential in therapy and the ways in which my own and my client’s intersecting identities may contribute to this, and to address these differences in therapy when warranted. I work with clients to explore their various identities in ways that feel most important to them, and to understand how their identities impact the ways they interact with the world. While my specific interests center around gender, body image, and race/ethnicity, I enjoy working with clients to explore the intersection of any and all of their identities.

Outreach interests

I enjoy doing outreach in a variety of modalities (presentations, psychoeducation, discussion, events) and am especially interested in outreach topics around eating disorders and body image, diet culture, sexual assault awareness, rape culture, and bystander intervention for both sexual assault and harassment in general.

Professional affiliations:

I am a member of the American Psychological Association: Division 35 – Society for the Psychology of Women.

Education

• 2021 – Adler University, Chicago, Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology