Dr. Ng (she/her/hers) conducts research with the goal of advancing the science and practice of psychotherapy for youths, especially adolescents with depression. She employs two main strategies in her research program. First, she examines change mechanisms and processes of evidence-based psychotherapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy to better understand how they work. Second, she studies how to personalize mental health interventions by developing and applying methods to select and tailor therapies to maximize benefit to each individual youth.
A current focus of her research at the Mechanisms Underlying Treatment Technologies (MUTT) Lab is to track depressed adolescents'; emotions, cognitions and behaviors in real-time. The aims are to learn how each of each these variables change over time, which variables drive changes in other variables, and whether these "drivers"and longitudinal relationships differ across individuals. It is hoped that this research may inform the personalized sequencing of treatment modules for individual youths.
research interests
Youth psychotherapy change mechanisms, processes, and outcomes Personalized intervention strategies Adolescent depression, anxiety, and health risk behaviors Ecological momentary assessment Meta-analysis
