Philip Held, PhD
Principal Investigator, Licensed Clinical Psychologist
(he/him)
Dr. Held is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Rush University Medical Center. He also serves as Research Director of the Road Home Program: National Center of Excellence for Veterans and Their Families at Rush, where he oversees a large number of clinically-focused research projects that aim to innovate and improve existing treatments for traumatic stress.
Before joining Rush University Medical Center, Dr. Held obtained his PhD in Counseling Psychology from the University of Tennessee where he was part of the Military Health and Stress research group. Dr. Held went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship specializing in Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) at the Center for Trauma Recovery in St. Louis, MO.
Dr. Held’s research aims to personalize and enhance care for PTSD and other trauma-related disorders. Specifically, his research focuses on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of existing evidence-based interventions, and making treatments more accessible. Dr. Held is particularly passionate about using advanced analytics to identify key predictors of treatment success and moderators that impact clinical outcomes.
Sarah Pridgen, MA, LCPC
Research Manager
(she/her)
Sarah has a BA in Special Education from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and is a former special education teacher. She received her MA in Clinical Psychology from Roosevelt University. Sarah has experience providing individual and group therapy with at-risk populations experiencing highly acute symptomology including psychotic symptoms, suicide ideation, homicide ideation, and aggression. She also has experience combining her training as a special education teacher with her clinical work by providing specialized therapy to individuals with intellectual and/or physical disabilities. Her research interests include exploring neural mechanisms that support intensive treatments, especially as they relate to cognition. She is also interested in the utilization of machine learning to aid in the advancement of clinical care by using data to predict which individuals will most benefit from intensive treatment formats.
Charles Small, LCSW
Study Therapist
Marley Warren
Research Assistant
(he/him)
Marley received a BA in psychology from the University of Michigan after studying sexual- and gender-minoritized individuals’ mental health at the Stigma Psychopathology and Assessment (SPLAT) Lab. His research interests include emotion regulation, trauma spectrums, the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology, and borderline personality disorder.