Megan C. Chen, B.A.

Hey there! I’m Megan, an aspiring clinical psychological scientist. 👋 

I am a post-baccalaureate Clinical Research Assistant at the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry's Mobile Health and Adaptive Interventions Lab (mHail). In my role, I support four NIMH-funded grants focused on leveraging mobile technologies to develop adaptive interventions for suicidal youth, adults, and families. I graduated magna cum laude from New York University’s College of Arts and Science in 2024 with a degree in psychology and economics, complemented by advanced graduate coursework in quantitative methods. My undergraduate honors thesis used economic game paradigms to explore how depression affects decision-making under escalating uncertainty. The big research question I am interested in is Why do people hurt themselves? And how and when can we best intervene to support them? To answer this question, I leverage novel assessment methods (e.g., intensive longitudinal data, psychometric theory, and computational clinical science) and mobile technologies to measure how suicide and self-injury unfold in real time. In particular, I am interested in identifying the cognitive and affective processes that shape moment-to-moment risk and resilience. 

I intend to pursue a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, with the goal of advancing theory-driven, scalable, and technology-enabled approaches to improve our ability to understand, predict, and prevent suicide and self-injury.

In my free time, I enjoy figure skating, journaling, and finding new study spots!