Sasha Gorrell
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Psychology
Eating disorders are rising among adolescents, and specialty treatment programs often have long waitlists. Waiting delays care, which raises the risk of poor outcomes and of symptoms becoming chronic.
- Fields
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
eating disorders
anorexia nervosa
adolescents
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- Engage youth, caregivers and clinician stakeholders during a preparatory phase to adapt a single-session consultation protocol for families waiting for specialty eating disorder treatment.
- Test the feasibility and acceptability of the single-session consultation and of the evaluation procedures through an iterative case series with 10 treatment-seeking families.
- Evaluate, in a pilot randomized controlled trial with 44 families, whether the consultation engages its hypothesized mechanisms of change — hope, self-efficacy and motivation — and affects eating disorder symptoms and later treatment engagement.
- Collect implementation indicators using the RE-AIM framework (reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, maintenance) to judge how the consultation could be delivered in routine care settings.
More about the research
In other areas of youth mental health, very brief interventions — sometimes a single meeting — have shown promise both for producing change on their own and for keeping families engaged until longer treatment begins. No study has yet tested that idea for young people with eating disorders.
Why it matters
Long waits for eating disorder care leave adolescents and families without support at a critical moment. A brief, one-session consultation that is scalable and easy to disseminate could bridge that gap, sustain motivation for treatment and potentially reduce harm from delayed care for a growing group of young patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Psychology·Early-career
Adapt an existing digital single-session intervention for adolescent siblings of children with cancer using solution-focused brief therapy, refined through Think Aloud sessions with 12 siblings.
Abigail Batchelder
Boston University, MA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether the MATTER intervention, five virtual therapy sessions plus personalized texting and resource navigation, improves viral suppression at 12 months compared with a time-matched control, in a randomized controlled trial of 256 people with HIV and substance use disorders.
Megumi J Okumura
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether the Resilience in Action (RiA) curriculum improves self-determination, self-efficacy, social confidence and emotional regulation in a randomized waitlist-control trial of 288 young adults with autism aged 19 to 26.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
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