Jennifer Morse, Ph.D.

Hometown: Greensboro, NC
Joined Chatham: 2012

ACADEMIC AREAS OF INTEREST

• Training counselors and psychologists
• Social justice
• Learning-based psychotherapies
• Diversity climate surveys
• Personality and personality disorders (waning)
• Successful aging (waning)
• Late life mood disorders (waning)

PERSONAL AREAS OF INTEREST

• Spending time with my high energy child and my spouse
• Cooking, baking, bread making, sewing and quilting
• Reading
• Socializing with friends and co-conspirators
• NIA and Billion Rising (ask me about it)
• Daydreaming about having time to do all the things I love

BIOGRAPHY

I came to Pittsburgh for my Psychology Internship and stayed because of the personal and professional opportunities that Pittsburgh offered. Before Chatham, I did NIH-funded research at the University of Pittsburgh on personality disorders (borderline personality disorder) and late-life mood disorders. Collaborations with faculty at Pitt means that I have access to secondary data sets and have enjoyed projects like training lay mental health counselors in Goa, India in Problem Solving Therapy (PST) and a similar project in Tanzania, supervising behavioral health staff providing support to decision makers with a loved one in the ICU, and training and supervising graduate students to provide PST via secure video conference to family caregivers of veterans with a traumatic brain injury.

I continue to be interested in learning-based psychotherapies and have expanded that interest to training counselors and psychologists, particularly for working in integrated care settings, and social justice. My interests in personality disorders and mood disorders are now waning. Many years ago now, the Long Purple Line team was formed when Chatham’s undergraduate programs transitioned to co-education. The Long Purple Line project assessed students’ reactions to that transition as well as perceptions of the inclusiveness of the campus climate. Several years of repeated surveys mean that I have data one could analyze if interested.

I lead or co-lead several Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Behavioral Workforce Education and Training (BHWET) grants. These grants – the Supporting Wellness (WELL): Expanding Psychology Training in Integrated Care Project, the Healthcare Alliance Promoting Pittsburgh Youth (HAPPY) Project, and the Leadership, Advocacy, and Supervision Training (LAST) Project – all focus on focuses on placing MS, PsyD, and OT students in practica settings offering integrated care or school-based care, serving medically underserved populations, and recognizing suicidality, substance use, and trauma and responding skillfully to those issues. Training events from these BHWET projects are open to all students and faculty in the College of Health Sciences. The WELL Project has been completed; the HAPPY and LAST projects are nearing completion; we anticipate submitting another grant in Fall 2025 or Spring 2025 for continued funding for training.

Administrative role
As Executive Director of Counseling and Wellness, I lead the Counseling Center. As a Counseling Center, we focus on both training and providing care. This expanded focus joins nicely with our shift to a more comprehensive and proactive view of wellness, including increased preventive and wellness programming and a briefer first appointment, which increases accessibility of care and decreases sigma associated with seeking care or support. The collaboration between the Counseling Center and Counseling Psychology program provides a rich training experience for 1st year doctoral students, which increases not only staffing but also increases diversity, interests, and theoretical models. This work also dovetails with the goals of our Garrett Lee Smith Campus Suicide Prevention grant, called the JXS Project to recognize JED Campus expertise, un-named students who die by suicide and overdose, and Garrett Lee Smith. The JXS Project focuses on increasing programming and outreach to increase knowledge of services and resources, decrease stigma, increase help-seeking behaviors, and teach life skills to improve student mental health and emotional wellbeing.

Advising style
Advising and mentoring are one of my favorite parts of being at Chatham. I am generally a hands-on, involved advisor. I strive to be responsive to student questions, concerns, and requests. I also try to be transparent about academics, program requirements or competencies, and program processes. I meet with students as frequently or infrequently as they would like, until they are working towards a dissertation topic or proposal. Once in the dissertation process, I prefer to meet with advisees regularly (weekly or bi-weekly) to keep the writing and research process moving forward and to deal with challenges proactively. I believe strongly that good academic writing is a learned skill obtained through regular practice and detailed feedback. While I am delighted when an advisee’s research or clinical interests are close to my own, I’m willing to entertain topics outside of my own passions.

Advisee dissertation titles or topics

• Our masculinity does not have to be the same for you to see me as the same : a comparative study among black men on the effects of gender presentation and sexual behaviors on connection to community (A. Walker, 2017)
• Strength-based assessment : associations between psychosocial strengths, preventative treatment recommendations, treatment adherence, and successful aging in urban community-dwelling older black adults (H. Plakosh, 2017)
• Mindfulness-based exposure and response prevention for obsessive-compulsive disorder among a pediatric intensive outpatient population (L. Collier, 2020)
• Co-creating sustainable and healthful communities : an examination of a brief microcounseling skills training and engagement with a refugee youth summer camp (A. Olson, 2021)
• The Childhood Cognition and Play Study (C-CAPs) (P. Suess, 2020)
• Black adolescent and young adult suicidal ideation, belongingness, and the role of interpersonal factors (D. Benson, 2022)
• Feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness of a group-based mindfulness intervention for older children at risk for bipolar disorder  (A. Ostroff, 2022)
• Returning to nature : simulated nature strengthens the effects of exercise on attention and mood (T. Hakala, 2024)
• The impact on court-involved of program training on cultural humility, attachment, and emotion regulation for court advocate volunteers

EDUCATION

• B.A., Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, PA), 1993
• Ph.D., Duke University (Durham, NC), 2002