From left: The LEAP Lab enjoys a holiday happy hour, Austin; LEAP Lab group photo; LEAP Mascot Willa enjoys the ABCT Convention.
About the Lab
The Leveraging Evidence and Advancing Practice for Youth Mental Health Services Laboratory (LEAP Lab) focuses on helping underserved children and families through the dissemination and implementation of Evidence-Based Practices (EBPs) for mental health in low-resource settings.
We focus on harnessing existing mental health treatments and finding ways to make them more available and helpful. Often this research involves re-thinking existing treatments to increase access or adoption, finding creative ways to work with systems that haven’t traditionally offered evidence-based mental health practices, and evaluating ways of training and supporting providers who work with children and families. For example. . .
How can multiple existing interventions to treat a range of different disorders be consolidated to more efficiently address complex and comorbid children? Can interventions that work in mental health settings be successfully adapted for schools?
Can elements of evidence-based practice be redesigned to reach children and families in non-mental health settings, such as primary care or childcare centers? Can non-traditional work forces increase access to effective services?
What types of supervision helps providers to use evidence-based practices? How does this relate to what happens in typical mental health settings for children and families?
The goals of the lab do not typically involve the study of mental health problems or developing new interventions, but rather in expanding the reach and impact of practices that have benefitted from decades of previous psychological research (for an introduction to the goals and challenges in dissemination and implementation research, please see Weisz, Ng, & Bearman, 2014. Additionally, to get an idea of the kind of research that has come out of the lab, please see the “Selected Publications” tab of the website.
Careers/Graduate School
The LEAP Lab is a research laboratory within the School Psychology Program in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Individuals interested in graduate school or in working with the LEAP Lab are encouraged to check out the Prospective Graduate Student page to learn more and contact us for information about clinical research opportunities. Please note that Dr. Bearman is primarily engaged in research involving the Dissemination & Implementation of Evidence-Based Practices and accepts graduate students based on their interest and/or experience in that field. Dr. Bearman will be accepting new graduate students for the 2022-2023 School Year.
References
Weisz, J. R., Ng, M. Y., & Bearman, S. K. (2014). Odd couple? Reenvisioning the relation between science and practice in the dissemination-implementation era. Clinical Psychological Science, 2(1), 58–74.