Psychology Summer Internship - Yale University School of Medicine - Adolescent Eating Disorders

Yale Teen Power is part of Yale Power, which is an active research group at the Yale School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry. We have ongoing studies funded by the NIH and foundations that help us learn about the treatment of eating disorders. Yale Teen Power focuses specifically on adolescents with higher weight. We also have large-scale survey-based research studies on mental health and behaviors related to eating and weight. Faculty have a strong commitment to the education of the next generation of clinical-researchers and believe that exposure to both clinical work and clinical research across a spectrum of activities can help students make decisions about the kind of career they want to pursue. Prospective interns best-suited to this position will be those who are interested in health care (such as clinical psychology or medical school) and who are interested in learning about patient-oriented research.

The internship will include: 

1) research activities related to NIH-funded treatment trials (clinical activities are limited by patient confidentiality, although some opportunities to shadow psychologists and research clinicians may be available), including study material preparation, exposure to clinical protocols, and participant recruitment. 

2) research activities related to survey research projects, including designing (as possible) and testing surveys, as well as assisting patients who complete surveys in clinics. 

3) group and/or individual project from start (generating hypotheses) to finish (presenting findings). Past intern projects have included examining Super Bowl commercials for weight bias, collecting data on perceptions of eating disorders with variable “patient” weight, and quantifying the content of food records. Depending on interests and current opportunities, interns will work with their mentor to decide whether to use available data, collect their own, or work with materials that are part of the larger studies. This mentored project will be suited to submit to a conference and may also be considered for publication as a scientific article.

Mentorship is primarily one-on-one with Dr. Lydecker, who welcomes questions and is on-site. Interns also have weekly research group meetings with other members of the POWER group and affiliates, which will have didactic and experiential components (including professionalism, career exploration, reading articles, generating hypotheses, data analysis, among others).

The internship will be hybrid; students will spend 3 days on site and 1 day working from home per week.

Qualifications:

Prospective interns should be interested in learning about a health career and should be interested in learning about patient-oriented research. Students with coursework that included reading scientific articles, writing a literature review, OR conducting statistical analyses are preferred, so please talk about those experiences in your cover letter. No clinical experience is necessary, although coursework in psychology or similar disciplines related to mental health or physical health is preferred. Although not required, additional opportunities may be available to students who read and/or speak Spanish.