Student Spotlight Award Recipient - Jessica Stark

Congratulations to Jessica Stark on being selected as the Student Spotlight Award winner for May 2018!

The purpose of this award is to highlight students who are doing important work in the CBS community whether for research, clinical, and/or volunteer-humanitarian efforts.

This is a way to highlight their achievements, let the ACBS community know important work students are doing, and possibly provide a platform for mentoring/collaboration/professional development/conversations around highlighted areas.

---

Learn more about Jessica:

Background of CBS Research/Clinical/Volunteering efforts/achievements:
I have done various types of work in CBS including clinical work, research, and volunteering, and have also received ongoing training. Clinically, I currently use CBS to inform my internship work at HealthPoint doing primary care behavioral health. The primary population with whom I work in this setting is low-income, including people who are uninsured or underinsured, unemployed, homeless, addicted to drugs, those who have significant medical and mental illness, and new refugees including using interpreters regularly. For research, I worked on Dr. Jonathan Bricker’s team at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center for two years on a study comparing ACT for smoking cessation with typical CBT quit line treatment; in contributing to this research, I provided interventions to primarily low-income, uninsured populations. I also volunteered for two years at South King County Clinic in Seattle providing mental health services, including short interventions such as FACT, to community members who needed free medical, dental, and vision care. Additionally, I have been a student member of ACBS since 2014, was a member of the SIG Review Committee last year, and was the Graduate Student Representative of Washington State Psychological Association for 1.5 years. Lastly, I have attended various CBS-focused conferences including a two-day seminar hosted by the Washington ACBS Chapter with speakers such as Drs. Patty Robinson, Kirk Strosahl, Robert Kohlenberg, and Mavis Tsai, and I have attended multiple online webinars hosted by ACBS’s Dr. D.J. Moran and others.

Autobiography:
I am in my final year towards getting my PsyD at Antioch University Seattle, which has a social justice mission. I have a clinical, empirically-based practice focus to my work, and have a passion working with low-income and underserved populations. I have worked in various clinical settings including in primary care and pediatric clinics, in community mental health, at a school for developmentally differently-abled kids, and an adult psychiatric in-patient facility. I love working with the LGBT community, pregnant and new moms, and individuals on medication assisted treatment for opioid dependence among others, and love being a generalist through the primary care behavioral health (PCBH) model. My dissertation was on video game psychology and what it means for individuals to play the game, The Sims, and find it important to embrace how video games and online communities can contribute to positive identity development. I connected with the Washington State Psychological Association community early in my graduate schooling, connecting to the ACBS community through Dr. Chris McCurry. Since then I have fully embraced using ACT as my main modality for clinical work and conceptualizations, as honed through my training and work with Dr. Jonathan Bricker’s team at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center using ACT for smoking cessation. I have also been fortunate enough to learn about FACT, and its applications in PCBH directly from its creators, Drs. Patty Robinson and Kirk Strosahl. As I plan to graduate in summer 2018, I look forward to seeing what the future holds for me!

Future goals:
I hope to continue to provide CBS-based clinical care to underserved populations through primary care behavioral health.