Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior

Elinor Waite graduated with a B.A. in psychology and women’s studies from the University of Nevada Reno in 2017. She began her doctoral training in clinical psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst under the mentorship of Dr. Katherine Dixon-Gordon. Elinor’s research has focused on borderline personality disorder (BPD), affective lability and dysregulation, impulsivity and risky behaviors, and suicide risk. She also received extensive training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy, taught multiple undergraduate courses, and served as a consultant in quantitative statistics and methodology in the Institute for Social Science Research at UMass Amherst. She received her M.S. in clinical psychology in 2022 from UMass Amherst and, in June of 2024, successfully defended her dissertation on the subjective and physiological effects of instructed cognitive reappraisal use on emotion reactivity among patients with BPD. During her clinical psychology pre-doctoral internship at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Elinor worked with Dr. Jessica Peters to extend her research program to include examining effects of menstrual hormone fluctuations on psychopathological symptom expression and suicide risk, resulting in an NIH F32 submission. She is excited to continue her training at Brown within the Research Fellowship Program as a postdoctoral fellow on the Suicide Research T32, under the ongoing mentorship of Dr. Peters. Elinor is immensely grateful for the mentors, family, friends, and cohort-mates who have supported and guided her throughout her graduate education. Most importantly, she wishes to recognize and thank the patients and research participants who have allowed her to learn from their experiences.