Jeffrey Girard

Lab Director

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Biography

Dr. Jeffrey Girard studies how emotions are expressed through verbal and nonverbal behavior, as well as how interpersonal communication is influenced by individual differences (e.g., personality and mental health) and social factors (e.g., culture and context). This work is deeply interdisciplinary and draws insights and tools from various areas of social science, computer science, statistics, and medicine.

He completed his doctoral training under the mentorship of Dr. Jeffrey Cohn (nonverbal behavior, machine learning, depression) and Dr. Aidan Wright (interpersonal functioning, statistics, personality). He then completed his predoctoral clinical internship at the University of Mississippi Medical Center (inpatient psychiatry, trauma treatment, neuropsychology) and a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University under the mentorship of Dr. Louis-Philippe Morency (verbal behavior, machine learning, computer science).

He is now an Assistant Professor in the department of Psychology at the University of Kansas, where he directs the Affective Communication and Computing lab and the Brain, Behavior, and Quantitative Science (BBQ) program. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on psychological assessment, data science, and statistics within the department and is a co-founder of SMaRT Workshops, which offers numerous methodological training workshops to faculty and students. He is also the developer and maintainer of numerous open-source research software packages (see Resources).

Experience

  • University of Kansas | Lawrence, KS, USA
    Assistant Professor of Psychology | 2020–Current
    Wright Faculty Scholar | 2020–2025
    Director of the BBQ Doctoral Program | 2022–Current
    Co-Director of the Kansas Data Science Consortium | 2023-Current

  • Carnegie Mellon University | Pittsburgh, PA, USA
    Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Computer Science | 2018–2020

  • University of Mississippi Medical Center | Jackson, MS, USA
    Clinical Intern, Department of Psychiatry | 2017–2018

Journal Editing

  • NPP Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience
    Consulting Editor | 2023–Current
  • Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science
    Consulting Editor | 2023–Current
  • IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
    Associate Editor | 2022–Current
  • Collabra Psychology
    Associate Editor | 2021–Current
  • Clinical Psychological Science
    Consulting Editor | 2021–Current
  • Psychological Assessment
    Consulting Editor | 2020–2022

Education

  • University of Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh, PA, USA
    PhD in Psychology (Clinical) | 2013–2018

  • University of Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh, PA, USA
    MS in Psychology (Clinical) | 2010–2013

  • University of Washington | Seattle, WA, USA
    BA in Psychology & Philosophy (Honors) | 2005–2008