Specialists in Artificial Intelligence

• Tell us about your current professional roles and activities: 

I am an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Georgia State University, where my research focuses on generative AI and digital tools in clinical psychology. I teach psychopathology as well as an advanced seminar on generative AI and mental health.

I am a licensed clinical psychologist in the state of Georgia and am board certified in Behavioral and Cognitive Psychology. I am also an inaugural fellow of the NIH AIM-AHEAD consortium’s Clinicians Leading Ingenuity in AI Quality program. In addition, I regularly provide continuing education workshops for psychologists and other mental health professionals across the United States.

At the international level, I serve on the Board of Directors for the International Society for Research on Internet Interventions and co-founded the Equity & Action Special Interest Group. Most recently, I served as an expert panel member for the American Psychological Association’s (APA)  Health Advisory on the Use of Generative AI Chatbots and Wellness Applications for Mental Health.

• What do you enjoy most about your job?

It’s hard to choose!  I enjoy working with undergraduate and graduate students pursuing their passions and professional paths. I enjoy conducting intentional, purposeful research and collaborating with colleagues locally, nationally, and internationally across disciplines. I enjoy giving continuing education workshops – connecting with full-time practitioners keeps it real.  All of it is intellectually stimulating.

Overall, my job feels aligned with my values and professional purpose: using psychological science to make a positive impact on our world. My cup is full (sometimes overflowing) with what I enjoy about my job.

• What inspired you to get board certified?

I wanted to serve as a role model for doctoral students in my training program.

• How has board certification contributed to your professional activities?

Board certification has connected me with an accomplished and engaged community of psychologists and has opened doors to professional opportunities. For example, I was invited to serve as a guest on Beyond the Couch, a podcast focused on artificial intelligence in psychology, hosted by ABPP Fellow Dr. Ernest Wayde and co-sponsored by the American Board of Professional Psychology and the National Register of Health Service Psychologists.

• What advice would you give to psychologists or trainees interested in pursuing board certification?

Make it a professional goal and pursue it when the time is right. Preparing for the exam is an opportunity for reflection and more enjoyable than you think. 

• How do you utilize artificial intelligence in your professional activities?

I use AI in practical, perhaps boring ways. My kids tease me that I’m the only person who reads privacy policies. I use AI to help me identify key points buried in dense legal language. For example, I use it to better understand speaker-release forms for continuing education workshops and webinars—documents I used to sign without fully appreciating their real-world implications.

I also use AI as a communication tool. I tend to be wordy, so I use AI to help revise emails to make them clearer and more concise.

Most recently, I began using AI to help me help a doctoral student in my lab prepare her general exam for publication. I am double-coding articles for a systematic review using a risk-of-bias tool that is new to me. The manual for this tool is 250 pages long. I read the manual (many times!) and understand it, but it was taking me hours and hours to get through a handful of articles. I now experiment with using AI to clarify specific points and check my understanding. This reduces the cognitive load involved in finding the answer in the manual and allows me to focus on critically evaluating the research itself.

• What advice would you give to psychologists or trainees interested in integrating artificial intelligence into their professional activities?

My first piece of advice is to understand the privacy policies and terms of service for any AI platform you use. These documents can be long and hard to understand, but before scrolling down to the bottom and clicking ‘I agree’,  you can use AI itself to help summarize and clarify them so you understand how your data may be handled.

Whenever possible, use AI platforms provided by your organization rather than free, general-purpose tools. Institutionally sponsored platforms typically offer stronger data protection. I use a university-supported AI account that is housed on university servers; the company’s access to the data is limited (e.g., for regulatory compliance), and the data are not used to train the company’s models. That said, regardless of the platform, do not enter personal, sensitive, or identifiable information.

Know that AI will be wrong sometimes. Always verify the accuracy of its responses. Generative AI wants to please you and will produce a plausible-sounding response every time, even when it is inaccurate.

Psychologists and trainees need to learn the basics of AI. One place to start is “prompt engineering,” a technological sounding term which simply refers to the skill of writing clear, precise questions or instructions for AI tools. The quality of the output is highly dependent on the quality of the prompt.

AI is dependent on humans, humans are not dependent on AI. It may feel like technology is inevitable and leading us, but we have more power and agency than it feels like we do.