Psychology & Global Health Departments Promotion Talk by Kate Foster

Toward Precision Clinical Science

Katherine Foster, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Departments of Psychology and Global Health, University of Washington

One of the most complex aspects of human behavior is its heterogeneity: individuals experiencing the same situation, identifying with similar personal identities, in the same developmental stage, or sharing a common diagnosis report different experiences and outcomes. Clinical phenomena – like depression or alcohol use problems – rarely exhibit identical antecedents, symptoms, severity, consequences, or trajectories, even after receipt of gold standard, evidence-based treatment. Consequently, person-to-person differences, changes within individuals over time, and within individual effects that differ across people pose critical challenges for describing, assessing, evaluating mechanisms of, and treating psychopathology at the population-level, where one-size-fits are typically applied across maximally diverse cases. Motivated by a desire to understand general laws and principles (i.e., nomothetic effects, ones that apply to many people) that govern psychological and clinical processes and mechanisms, clinical science research has long-relied on ergodic assumptions which posit that group-level statistical patterns accurately represent individual-level processes (i.e., an effect is generalizable) and manifest uniformly over time (i.e., an effect is stationary). In this talk, I share insights and challenges from my ongoing work investigating violations of these assumptions in clinical science research and suggest adjustments that may help maximize individual-level precision of scalable, population-level risk prediction, assessment, and effective treatment across the life course.

This free lecture is part of the promotion review for Dr. Foster in the Department of Psychology.

Committee chair: Shannon Dorsey
This is a hybrid event.