CANH Faculty
Dr. Maragakis' current research interests involve using quality improvement methods to analyze integrated behavioral and primary care settings in regards to somatic and behavioral outcomes, as well as cost and provider burnout and efficiency. He has also received multiple state and federal grants to build and expand training sites in integrated care settings to produce highly trained behavioral healthcare providers that can work effectively in an interdisciplinary team.
Dr. Renée Lajiness-O’Neill, is a professor of psychology, neuroscience and pediatric neuropsychologist. She is passionate about screening, risk detection, and surveillance of childhood disorders, particularly neurodevelopmental disorders. Her long-term goal is to identify the earliest bio-behavioral signatures of severe developmental psychopathologies. Her research focuses on illuminating brain-behavior relationships in children with neurodevelopmental disorders as well as development and validation of assessment methods to characterize neurobehavioral development. She is currently Project Director/Principal Investigator of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 multisite, longitudinal grant (“PediaTrac: Web-based Measure to Screen and Track Early Developmental Trajectories”) for which her team is developing and validating a web-based tool to identify risk trajectories of neurodevelopmental (e.g., autism, cerebral palsy) and acquired disorders of childhood and related developmental psychopathologies. She is also Project Director/Principal Investigator of a National Science Foundation (NSF Major Research Instrumentation) grant award for which her team is developing electroencephalography (EEG) methods for infancy and toddlerhood studies. Her research, funded both internally and externally, focuses on exploring the cognitive, behavioral and neural correlates of neurodevelopmental disorders using neuropsychological and neurophysiological methods such as magnetoencephalography (MEG) and EEG. She has over 60 peer-reviewed publications, books, and book chapters as well as over 180 presentations.
Dr. Jamie Lawler is a clinical and developmental psychologist with expertise in early adversity, parenting, and neurobehavioral development. Her research program is grounded in developmental psychopathology and focuses on the impact of early life stress on early childhood mental health and development. She has a particular interest in self-regulation, parent-child relationship factors that promote resilience, and interventions to support positive development in children exposed to adversity. Her work examines developmental processes at multiple levels of analysis, incorporating bio-markers of stress, dyadic parent-child interactions, and environmental influences on parenting and child development. Her current research projects include a study of the development of self-regulation over the preschool years and an evaluation of a home-visiting parent-child intervention (Michigan Infant-Mental Health Home Visiting).
Dr. Adam Briggs is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst at the Doctoral Level (BCBA-D) and a licensed behavior analyst (LBA) in Michigan. Dr. Briggs earned his Ph.D. in Behavioral Psychology from the Department of Applied Behavioral Science (ABS) at the University of Kansas (KU) under the mentorship of Dr. Claudia Dozier and was the recipient of the 2016 KU ABS Baer, Wolf, and Risley Outstanding Graduate Student Award for excellence in teaching, research, and service and the 2017 APA Division 25 SEAB Applied Dissertation Award. Dr. Briggs also completed a 2-year Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and Munroe-Meyer Institute’s Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders under the mentorship of Dr. Wayne Fisher, where he functioned as a case manager in the severe behavior clinic and assisted with the oversight and implementation of several lines of NIH grant-funded research focused on improving the practicality, generality, and durability of function-based interventions for severe challenging behavior.
Currently, Dr. Briggs is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Eastern Michigan University (EMU), where he directs the Behavior Analysis Research Laboratory. Dr. Briggs and the Behavior Analysis Research Lab are committed to promoting research, training, and clinical service delivery to individuals diagnosed with autism and other developmental disabilities across the lifespan. Specifically, he and the students in his lab are interested in (a) improving the safety, efficiency, and validity of functional assessment methods, (b) determining the variables that prevent relapse of challenging behavior and promote maintenance and generalization of treatment effects, and (c) developing effective training strategies for efficiently teaching caregivers and professionals to implement and adhere to behavioral interventions with high procedural integrity. Dr. Briggs has published over 25 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters on these topics and was the recipient of the 2022 Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty: Research I Award, which is the highest honor EMU presents to an individual faculty member.
Taken together, these research, training, and clinical service activities align with the mission of EMU's Center for the Advancement of Neurobehavioral Health by providing students with high-quality instruction and learning opportunities beyond the classroom. In addition to fulfilling this training need, Dr. Briggs and his students also provide a much-needed behavioral health service to the community by serving individuals diagnosed with autism and other developmental disabilities across their lifespan.
Dr. Drossel is an associate professor, an experimental psychologist and a licensed clinical psychologist. She specializes in neurobehavioral health, functional analytic approaches to case formulations, and the modular application of evidence-based practices with adults in midlife and older. In addition to disseminating and implementing best practices for health promotion and disease prevention, her work aims at enhancing relationships and quality of life in situations that involve a "break with reality" -- when a person sees or hears things that nobody else does, or reports things that did not happen. Current research projects include the assessment of the impact of cognitive loss (e.g., related to Alzheimer's, Lewy body disease, or other neurological conditions) on individuals and families and the delivery of individually tailored interventions in the clinic and in the home.
Thomas J. Waltz, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Eastern Michigan University (EMU). His current research involves several themes. The first is applying concepts from basic behavioral science and behavioral economics to address mental and behavioral health functioning. For example, a current project assesses how people value sleep to better understand the variables that impact this critical component of mental and behavioral health. The second theme involves mental and behavioral healthcare workforce training. This includes activities like utilizing assessment and structured case formulation to guide patient-centered evidence-based treatment. The third theme involves the implementation of evidence-based practices and programs in healthcare and community-based settings. This includes assessing barriers and facilitators to implementation, tailoring implementation strategies to meet the needs of specific care initiatives, and evaluating implementation strategies’ effectiveness in supporting clinicians’ and organizations’ utilization of evidence-based care.