Interests
I study clinical psychology at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Redwood City, California. My interests have always been broad and I wanted to do more than treat individuals, but also address systemic problems by applying psychology more broadly to social problems. I’ve been particularly interested in the psychosocial impact of disaster and the application of psychological science to improve the performance of large scale disaster management efforts.
Problem
In 2003 when I went to graduate school there were very few psychology programs that emphasized the relationship between the disaster events (natural or terror related), the application of clinical psychology, and a broader policy perspective. There was one program in South Dakota, the Disaster Mental Health Institute, but at the time I was looking for something that also addressed terrorism and related international policy issues. Many of the graduate programs I applied to in clinical psychology just did not seem to understand the interest in public policy or see a direct relationship between their research agendas and the policy implications. Discussing those interests with faculty members usually felt fruitless — policy interests were seen as ancillary to or a distraction from research — rather than a fundamental part of the research process.
Creating a Customized Learning Experience
I finally realized that I wasn’t going to be able to get what I wanted at any one institution. Instead, what I looked for was an educational foundation that could provide some of the research structure I was looking for, while also pursuing related training experiences that would broaden my expertise outside of this setting. During the interview process for graduate school, I met Dr. Bruce Bongar at Pacific Graduate School who was in the process of setting up a center to study terrorism and mass disaster in collaboration with faculty at Stanford University, the Naval Post Graduate School, and the Palo Alto Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center. After being accepted there, I heard that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had just set up a graduate fellowship program. I was able to secure one of these fellowships and my work as a DHS Fellow was a defining process for the first several years of graduate training.
National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism
I began training in clinical psychology and conducting research at the National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism (NCPT) in 2003. At that time, the NCPT was doing work on the psychology of terrorism and it housed the first Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) that focused exclusively on disaster mental health.
DHS Fellowship Program
During the first 3 years of graduate training, I was supported by the DHS Fellowship program. At the first meeting of DHS Fellows and scholars, I was struck by the very small number of behavioral science majors involved in the Fellowship program. During this meeting I made connections with three other Fellows, and despite the fact that we were studying at different institutions and we met only infrequently after that, those personal connections with others doing national security related work helped to alleviate the feelings of social isolation I felt at my home institution — where most graduate students were focused more exclusively on clinical training.
ANSER Internship
One of the requirements of the DHS Fellowship program was that Fellows had to intern for their first summer at a national laboratory, a federal agency, or with a DHS contractor. I interned at ANSER, Inc. in Arlington, VA. Although it would have made sense to place DHS interns in the Homeland Security Institute (HSI) at ANSER, HSI was so new at that time that they weren’t prepared to accept interns without security clearance. Instead, I worked with an intern advisor from the Joint War Fighting & National Strategies divisions. While the internship wasn’t particularly well set up for behavioral scientists, it did offer me several months to work without distraction on some interesting ideas.
A Diminished Sense of Place
UC, Riverside
One of the things I have struggled with the most is feeling that I don’t belong any place. During undergraduate, I was affiliated with a single university, I enjoyed the sense of the campus itself — the library had 78 volumes of José Martí’s work, there were quiet spots on the campus where the trees seemed to dance in the spring, and the bell tower soared above the campus — there is something about structures that are much larger than us that give the sense that the scholarly work one is engaged in is part of a much greater whole.
When I entered graduate school, this sense was gone. I was shuttling between a small clinical school, several VA hospitals, spending time in the DC area for internship, and occasionally showing up at a University of California campus, Stanford, or some private universities my wife was associated with. In point of fact, much of the work I was doing was being carried out from my apartment and a couple of local coffee shops rather than at any given campus (the idea of the Penny University is alive and well). I felt at times that I belonged to all of these institutions and none of them simultaneously. Each had strengths I was drawing from, but no single institution housed all of the elements I was trying to integrate. But at the same time, I longed for that feeling of belonging to a specific program, a particular physical space – to come to know, and perhaps even haunt, particular halls of a building. To have a specific physical structure to contain the intellectual ungrounding and expansion that comes with graduate training.
ISCRAM Conference
ISCRAM '07, Delft, The Netherlands
For me, some what to my surprise, the answer to the problem of place created by my “instance” of the metaversity was to become even more virtual. In my third year of graduate school I attended a conference called Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), held that year at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This was a breakthrough moment for me. For the first time, I was surrounded by people who shared my language, vision, and areas of interest. They were technologists with a strong interest in supporting human performance in the midst of disaster. I was a behavioral researcher in training with a strong interest in disasters and technology. Moreover, the conference started out from its inception as a transdisciplinary event that was designed and managed by others who had not felt their academic needs were being served in more traditional conference settings. The participants had literally found each other at other conferences and started talking about filling this gap. At the 2006 ISCRAM, I participated in the PhD student colloquium and met Dr. David Mendonça – a professor who has been examining improvisation in the context of disaster. His papers and period advice over the years that followed served to orient my own dissertation research. This single conference deeply impacted my understanding of my own work, situated it in a way that had not felt achievable prior to this point, and also began to provide the social support I need to feel as though I was functioning in a specialized, transdisciplinary department — even though there were no formal relationships between the institutions I was involved with and the laboratories the other attendees were from.
A map of this Metaversity Instance
I am hoping to find a more efficient mapping system that allows for deeper annotation, but for the moment, here is a google map that shows the primary locations where this work has been conducted or where substantial parts of my graduate education have been drawn from.
View this Metaversity instance in a larger map