The EMBARK Lab is moving! The EMBARK lab will transition to the Psychology Department at the University of Texas at Austin in 2025. Dr. Schaumberg will be reviewing applications for a Clinical Psychology PhD Student to start Fall 2025 at the University of Texas.
There are many resources available related to applying to graduate school in clinical psychology. I will not re-hash those here — the information on this page covers only that which is specific to the EMBARK Lab.
Some relevant information about the EMBARK lab as you embark on your application journey:
About the Lab (also see the Lab Manifesto):
- The EMBARK lab is a young lab, but it is not a brand new one. The lab has a solid foundation of data, while also having BIG opportunities for growth and development in the coming years. I am absolutely thrilled that the EMBARK lab will be taking the next step in growing our lab, and prospective students will have ample opportunity to become THE go-to expert on many topics in the lab as we continue to grow.
- We’ve got a lot going on! We have three ongoing lines of research that span eating disorder epidemiology, assessment, and intervention. For more details on the types of work that we do — I’ll encourage you to peruse the EMBARK Lab GitHub, which is abuzz with the latest in what we’re up to at the moment, including the codebooks for our Body Advocacy Movement(BAM). You’ll find more information on Project MAXED, our exercise assessment study, on our OSF pre-registration, and details about our TeenGrowth tool for predicting expected body weights among young people with eating disorders in this preprint. Graduate students in the lab would have the opportunity to become integral members of the study team for all of these projects, along with upcoming studies that 1) investigate weight trajectories across adolescent development in relation to ED risk and 2) shed light on shared vs. unique risk between anxiety and eating disorders in adolescence.
- We value reproducible team science. Part of our mission in the EMBARK lab is to elevate the methodological prowess of our own research as well as that of the eating disorder field. Reproducibility and harmonization are at the core of our day-to-day work. For graduate students, this means that a big piece of your process-mission will be practical skill development towards reproducible science. Within the lab, we write in Quarto/RMarkdown, use version control for collaboration, keep clean analytic repositories, and show persistence in the face of stack overflow so that we can be better collaborators and leaders in the field. What this means in practice is that —
- We do a lot of coding. This is a fair warning for anyone whose stomach is turning right now. If you do not have a lot (or any) coding experience — that is OK! BUT — check in with yourself. It is important that the prospect of spending hours on statistics, data science, and/or programming is something that fills your soul with a tiny fire of excitement.
- We are a clinical lab. Statistical and methodological interest are necessary, but not sufficient for someone who will be a good fit as a graduate student in the lab. At the end of the day, I am looking for a student who has genuine interest in both the methodological rigor of eating disorders research AND the clinical phenomenology of eating and exercise behavior. While some of our research focuses on large existing datasets, we also collect human subjects data and interact with youth with eating disorders in our in-lab work. An interest in working with adolescents, fascination with questions related to eating and exercise-related risk, and clinical accumen are all musts.
- Graduate students will be involved in many aspects of the lab, but their focus will not be prescriptive. While student projects will have origins in the ongoing projects of the lab, there is no one project that an incoming student must focus on for their scholarly work. Given the breadth of available projects in the lab, students with a range of interests (assessment, intervention, advocacy, data science, epidemiology, exercise, restrictive eating) will have ample opportunity to explore and develop novel research hypotheses tailored to their interests.
About Me:
- I value mentorship. I have mentored several students through their early careers. I strongly value invested mentorship and will provide trainees with the skills, training, resources, encouragement, and comic relief necessary to succeed in and beyond graduate training.
- My mentorship is active. At this point in both the lab’s and my life, I fall towards the ‘hands on’ side of the mentorship dimension, providing regular check-ins and feedback to trainees and an extremely high level of accessibility. I am highly integrated with day-to-day lab operations, knowing that the mentors that I have appreciated the most in my career are not those who spout the most eloquent rhetoric about leadership, but rather those who, by example, show up and do the dirty work. Graduate trainees have direct access to me as a mentor, and I expect that graduate students would be highly involved with the laboratory team and act as the ‘right hand’ of lab operations in tandem with research coordinators.
- I follow a junior colleague model of mentorship. This model specifically indicates that students are treated as both current and future colleagues, de-emphasizing hierarchical elements of the training relationship and encouraging students to take an active role in conceptualizing and improving our work.
- I set expectations high, I expect some struggle. I’m a set the bar high and see how far we can clear kind of gal. Please ask my mentees how it works for them — all in all, I expect solid effort, not perfection.
About You:
I expect that the strongest applicants to the lab will have 1) prior experience in a psychology or related lab, including meaningful research coordination work running human subjects trials, 2) strong interest in the EMBARK Lab’s content mission and 3) a foundation of methodological and statistical skills.
How and when to contact me.
It’s up to you! I will not privilege individuals who reach out in advance of the application deadline, though you are welcome to send an e-mail or say hello. I will NOT have 1:1 meetings with applicants before the application deadline
CAN’T WAIT TO READ YOUR APP!
