Emily Fu, a predoctoral clinical psychology intern, received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Society for Behavioral Medicine at the Society's 2024 annual meeting in Philadelphia. For her dissertation, Fu created and validated a new tool to measure how well a behavioral health intervention is individually tailored. For the purposes of her dissertation, she focused on family-based pediatric obesity interventions.

“I hope this award can launch interesting conversations with other researchers and future collaborations,” Fu said. “For a behavioral health program to be adequately tailored requires a lot of resources, understanding, and interdisciplinary collaboration.”

Fu’s dissertation, completed as part of her doctoral program at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, is made up of three distinct studies. The first is a scoping review of how tailoring has been used as a term in pediatric obesity interventions. The second is the creation and validation of the tool, which to Fu’s knowledge, is the first to measure individual tailoring. The third is a study that shows a positive correlation between individual tailoring and engagement and outcomes in pediatric obesity programs. Fu is in various stages of preparing and submitting the studies for publication.

After she completes her internship this spring, Fu will stay at Brown for a postdoctoral fellowship with the BRIDGE program, the implementation science core at the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior.

“I’m just very excited to be here at Brown, both as an intern as well as a continuing postdoc,” Fu said. “I think it's a behavioral medicine mecca for both research and clinical work. Being able to do both, and experiencing those synergies, has helped me so much as a researcher and clinician.”