Inaugural DPBS Psychology Early Career Award recipients Sasha Gorrell, PhD (left) and Erin Reilly, PhD (right).
Two assistant adjunct professors in the UC San Francisco Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences have been selected as the first recipients of a pair of new department awards honoring the achievements of psychologist clinicians and researchers. Both awards, open to faculty psychologists at the assistant level in the first 10 years of their postdoctoral career, were selected by a subcommittee of the department's Psychology Advisory Committee and come with a $1,000 prize and an opportunity to speak at the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Grand Rounds event on November 5, 2024.
Early Career Psychology Clinical Innovation Award
Clinician-researcher Erin Reilly, PhD, was named the 2024 recipient of the Early Career Psychology Clinical Innovation Award, which recognizes and celebrates innovative solutions to delivering clinical care that result in improved access, quality, continuity of care, or patient outcomes. These improvements may be accomplished through innovation in clinical practice, novel approaches to intervention, creative approaches to serving underserved populations, or innovation in management or advocacy.
Reilly received her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University at Albany in 2017, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the UC San Diego Eating Disorders Center, where she received extensive training in the assessment and treatment of eating disorders. Prior to joining UCSF in 2022, she was a faculty member in the clinical psychology PhD program at Hofstra University.
She is a member of the UCSF Eating Disorders Program, where her clinical responsibilities include providing outpatient therapy and conducting assessments. She also directs the Reilly Lab, whose research focuses on better characterizing maintenance mechanisms and shared features of anxiety and eating disorders, and using that knowledge to adapt behavioral treatments to meet the needs of non-responders. Her secondary lines of work focus on characterizing barriers to the implementation of evidence-based treatments in real-life clinical settings and the use of best practice assessment and statistical techniques in applied research settings. She is currently involved in leadership roles in the Academy for Eating Disorders' Early Career Special Interest Group, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies' Eating Disorder and Eating Behavior Special Interest Group, and the Coalition for the Advancement and Application of Psychological Science.
Early Career Psychology Research Award
Fellow clinician-researcher Sasha Gorrell, PhD, was named the inaugural recipient of the Early Career Psychology Research Award, which honors excellence, creativity, and innovation in psychological research as evidenced by outstanding innovation, theoretical or scholarly methodological contributions.
Gorrell also completed her doctoral studies in clinical psychology at the University at Albany, then came to UCSF in 2018 as a postdoctoral scholar in the Clifford Attkisson Clinical Services Research Training Program before joining the department faculty as a member of the Eating Disorders Program.
Her clinical focus is in the treatment of adolescents with restrictive eating disorders and specifically in supporting their recovery in family-based treatment. Her current research in the Gorrell Lab is centered on investigation of specific neurobiological risk and maintenance factors for problematic exercise behavior, as well as exploration of mechanisms related to reinforcement learning and anxiety that may be targeted within evidence-based treatment for eating disorders. In 2023, she was selected to receive a BBRF Young Investigator Grant to further her work adapting a treatment proven to be effective on obsessive-compulsive disorder to patients with anorexia nervosa.
About UCSF Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute are among the nation's foremost resources in the fields of child, adolescent, adult, and geriatric mental health. Together they constitute one of the largest departments in the UCSF School of Medicine and the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, with a mission focused on research (basic, translational, clinical), teaching, patient care, and public service.
UCSF Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences conducts its clinical, educational, and research efforts at a variety of locations in Northern California, including the UCSF Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building; UCSF Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital; UCSF Medical Centers at Parnassus Heights, Mission Bay, and Mount Zion; UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland; Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center; the San Francisco VA Health Care System; UCSF Fresno; and numerous community-based sites around the San Francisco Bay Area.
About the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences
The UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, established by the extraordinary generosity of Joan and Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill, brings together world-class researchers with top-ranked physicians to solve some of the most complex challenges in the human brain.
The UCSF Weill Institute leverages UCSF’s unrivaled bench-to-bedside excellence in the neurosciences. It unites three UCSF departments—Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Neurology, and Neurological Surgery—that are highly esteemed for both patient care and research, as well as the Neuroscience Graduate Program, a cross-disciplinary alliance of nearly 100 UCSF faculty members from 15 basic-science departments, as well as the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, a multidisciplinary research center focused on finding effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
About UCSF
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area.
