From My Perspective... There’s More to It Than the Individual Preeti Chauhan, PhD My research has diverged significantly from traditional forensic clinical psychology and moved toward a more interdisciplinary model that combines psychology with criminology and epidemiology—or seeing crime from a public health perspective. Each turning point was influenced by a personal interaction with a research participant or by results from prior research. The faces that go with my research questions keep me continually motivated to further understand the problem I am studying. Further, each research question often generates at least 10 additional lines of inquiry helping to continually build my research agenda. Here, I give you details of my path so far, which I am certain will continue to change as my research questions evolve. As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I was fortunate to work as a research assistant on the MacArthur Adjudicative Competency Study under the guidance of Dr. Jennifer Woolard. One of my responsibilities was to visit juvenile detention centers and conduct structured interviews with adolescents. It was then I learned that those caught in the justice system, especially in the juvenile justice system, are more than just their crimes. When I heard some of the horrifying situations and events these adolescents had experienced, I often I had thought, “If gone through this, I might be here as me understand that many well.” This helped of the adolescents in the juvenile justice system are not bad people, but people that have done bad things—often influenced by their own ill-fated backgrounds. Working on the adjudicative competence study piqued my interest in forensic psychology. My last year as an undergraduate, I obtained a summer internship at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy (ILPPP) at the University of Virginia. I worked with Dr. Janet Warren and learned a great deal about collecting data and managing large data sets. I returned to work at the ILPPP for another
From My Perspective... There’s More to It Than the Individual Preeti Chauhan, PhD My research has diverged significantly from traditional forensic clinical psychology and moved toward a more interdisciplinary model that combines psychology with criminology and epidemiology—or seeing crime from a public health perspective. Each turning point was influenced by a personal interaction with a research participant or by results from prior research. The faces that go with my research questions keep me continually motivated to further understand the problem I am studying. Further, each research question often generates at least 10 additional lines of inquiry helping to continually build my research agenda. Here, I give you details of my path so far, which I am certain will continue to change as my research questions evolve. As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I was fortunate to work as a research assistant on the MacArthur Adjudicative Competency Study under the guidance of Dr. Jennifer Woolard. One of my responsibilities was to visit juvenile detention centers and conduct structured interviews with adolescents. It was then I learned that those caught in the justice system, especially in the juvenile justice system, are more than just their crimes. When I heard some of the horrifying situations and events these adolescents had experienced, I often thought, “If I had gone through this, I might be here as well.” This helped me understand that many of the adolescents in the juvenile justice system are not bad people, but people that have done bad things—often influenced by their own ill-fated backgrounds. Working on the adjudicative competence study piqued my interest in forensic psychology. My last year as an undergraduate, I obtained a summer internship at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy (ILPPP) at the University of Virginia. I worked with Dr. Janet Warren and learned a great deal about collecting data and managing large data sets. I returned to work at the ILPPP for another
From%20My%20Perspective_Chauhan.docx