Biography
Professor of Psychology; received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Notre Dame in 2011 with a minor in Quantitative Psychology. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Denver Center for Marital and Family Studies and served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Miami University. Her areas of specialization and research include mental, physical, and relationship health in diverse populations. In each, she seeks to understand how partners can best communicate with and support one another to promote health and resilience in the face of stress. She has conducted couples studies in the areas of major depressive disorder and chronic pain. Dr. Post also has collaborated on longitudinal studies of the effects of relationship education and relationship development on individual, couple and family outcomes. Dr. Post is a licensed psychologist and designated as core doctoral faculty.
Interests
Teaching
I enjoy teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and mentoring students in independent research. My goal is to help students develop tools to gather and analyze information so that they can come to their own conclusions and think critically. I challenge students to make connections between research and practice or between topics in a course. Finally, I hope to motivate students to continue learning after courses end by making topics relevant to their lives. To achieve these goals, I collaborate with students and seek their feedback so that they are actively engaged and so I can meet them where they are at and modify my approach. I structure an open and safe environment with clear criteria and multiple methods of evaluation so that students can succeed. I use different learning strategies and examples so students can explore different perspectives and synthesize material. I give detailed and constructive feedback so that students can grow in their thinking, writing, and clinical skills.
Research
I strive to identify factors that can help partners work together to live healthy lifestyles, including having healthy relationships, and physical and mental well-being. The ultimate goal of my research is to use such knowledge to develop and test couple and family interventions. I am particularly interested in unique and specific factors contributing to healthy lifestyles for different groups including, aging couples, ethnic minority couples, couples with mental health concerns, and couples with chronic health conditions. Finally, I have a special interest in methodology and statistics including ecological momentary assessment, observational studies, and multilevel modeling.
Clinical
My clinical interests overlap with my research interests. I strive to have research inform practice and vice versa. Thus, my focus is on relationship education and intervention programs designed to simultaneously foster healthy relationship development and mental and physical health.
Dr. Post’s scholarly work can be found at Google Scholar and ResearchGate.