Jeffrey Girard
Lab Director
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 Associate 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).
Academic Experience
University of Kansas | Lawrence, KS, USA
Associate Professor of Psychology | 2025–Current
Assistant Professor of Psychology | 2020–2025
Wright Faculty Scholar | 2020–2025
Director of the BBQ Doctoral Program | 2022–2026
Co-Director of the Kansas Data Science Consortium | 2023–2026Carnegie Mellon University | Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Computer Science | 2018–2020University of Mississippi Medical Center | Jackson, MS, USA
Clinical Intern, Department of Psychiatry | 2017–2018
Industry Experience
Education
University of Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh, PA, USA
PhD in Psychology (Clinical) | 2013–2018University of Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh, PA, USA
MS in Psychology (Clinical) | 2010–2013University of Washington | Seattle, WA, USA
BA in Psychology & Philosophy (Honors) | 2005–2008
Selected Publications
- ★Evaluating Open-Weight Large Language Models for Structured Depression Assessment from Clinical Interviews
- ★Building Open Science into Graduate Training in Clinical Psychology
- ★Sentiment Analysis of Naturalistic Speech Using Open-Weight Large Language Models
- ★Computational Analysis of Expressive Behavior in Clinical Assessment
- ★Dynamic and Dyadic Relationships between Facial Behavior, Working Alliance, and Treatment Outcomes during Depression Therapy
- ★From Intuition to Innovation: Empirical Illustrations of Multimodal Measurement in Psychotherapy Research
- ★Transdiagnostic Modeling of Clinician-Rated Symptoms in Affective and Nonaffective Psychotic Disorders