Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior

Margaret Webb van Baar earned a B.S. with honors in marketing and a B.A. in economics from the University of Connecticut in 2015. She then spent three years at Nielsen in market research while completing a post-baccalaureate certificate in psychology at Columbia University. She transitioned to clinical psychology through a research assistantship at Rhode Island Hospital with Kathleen Kemp and Anthony Spirito, studying suicidal ideation and behavior among legally involved youth. In 2020, Margaret began her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at George Mason University, mentored by Drs. Jean-Louis van Gelder and Jerome Short. Her dissertation was supported by the National Science Foundation, Max Planck Society, and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst and examined thoughts about the future self as both a marker of risk and target of intervention for depression and suicidal ideation. Specifically, she identified cognitive patterns associated with risk and developed a virtual reality intervention to enhance future self-continuity and reduce symptoms. Margaret completed her pre-doctoral clinical psychology internship in the Juvenile Justice Track at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, training with systems-involved youth under Drs. Kathleen Kemp, Robert Miranda, Miyah Grant, and Katelyn Affleck. She will continue at Brown within the Adolescent/Young Adult Biobehavioral HIV T32 as a postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Drs. Kathleen Kemp and Larry Brown, extending her work to youth in the juvenile legal system. Margaret would like to thank her research mentors, clinical supervisors, friends, family, and husband, Jeroen, for being constant supports throughout this journey.