DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is an application for a K24 Midcareer Investigator Award in patient-oriented research. The candidate is a tenured Full Professor of Psychology at Florida International University, Miami. She is Director of the Child and Family Psychosocial Research Center, which houses the Child Anxiety and Phobia Program, wherein she conducts her main research activities and mentoring. Career Development Goals: The K24 award will serve to (1) To enhance the candidate's knowledge and expertise of data analytic issues involved in patient-oriented research, particularly mediational analyses for use in clinical trials; and (2) To enhance her knowledge and expertise in engaging and mentoring psychology and child psychiatry trainees in clinical research, with an emphasis on female Hispanic trainees. The K24 would thereby serve to facilitate both the candidate's scientific career development and research mentoring. Mentoring Goals: The K24 award will serve to (1) facilitate the refinement of the mentoring mechanism that the candidate has successfully used to mentor patient-oriented psychology research trainees and extend it to minority trainees in both psychology and child psychiatry (2) to publish at least two multi-authored 'state of the art' empirical papers per year, each with a psychology and a psychiatry trainee, as the first author. Research Goals: The candidate's current RO1, Therapy Specificity and Mediational Effects, will serve as the main platform for the proposed K24. This 'next generation' RO1 goes beyond whether treatment works to why treatment works. The specific aims are to evaluate the possible mediational effects of family/parents and peer/group contexts on child anxiety treatment response. Because of the intricacies of the study, a complex analytic plan has been designed to analyze this study's data. With this K award, the candidate will have an opportunity to enhance her data analytic skills and her trainees will also participate in the process of learning the advanced data analytic procedures and techniques.
