Mentoring and Advising

Program faculty are distributed widely across research and clinical settings within UAB's academic departments, the UAB Health System, and affiliated health care facilities such as the VA Medical Center and Children’s of Alabama Hospital. Faculty from all affiliated training facilities and departments work together to mentor and advise students in both research and clinical domains.

Each student has a research mentor who directs the student's primary research activities, chairs the thesis and dissertation committees, and commits to helping the student advance toward readiness for post-doctoral training or entry-level employment as a researcher in the area of clinical/medical psychology. Going beyond these usual benefits of a committed research mentor, UAB's highly collaborative clinical research culture offers additional unique benefits:

• Students are encouraged to take advantage of research training opportunities in multiple laboratories and clinics.
• Students often work with collaborative teams of faculty and students that develop around shared interests and research questions. 
• Research mentoring is available not only from clinical psychology faculty but from faculty in other academic disciplines including neuroscience, developmental psychology, and medicine.
• Because many students share interests with multiple faculty and develop skills that translate readily across research settings, students are protected from interruptions in education and funding due to changes in faculty availability.

Because of the unique focus and character of our program, we ensure that incoming students are an excellent fit both to the interests of individual faculty and to the program as a whole. Applicants are encouraged to identify their own research interests as well as faculty with whom they are interested in working on research.

Other Advising

A three- or four-member Graduate Advisory Committee (GAC) is individually selected for each student. This committee is made up of faculty with clinical and research expertise as well as knowledge of the program’s curriculum and training activities that are relevant to the student’s career goals. GACs play an important role in helping students select among the many clinical training opportunities that our program provides, and they work together with research mentors to guide students toward readiness for their internships and careers.

Because UAB and the Birmingham VA Medical Center also sponsor two APA-accredited clinical psychology internship programs, members of our faculty are very familiar with the internship application procedure. A faculty-led seminar has been held each summer and fall to assist students with guidance and feedback on all aspects of the internship application procedure. Many additional faculty also provide input and guidance on this process.