Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (C–CAP) Lab
Welcome!
The overarching goal of the Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (C-CAP) lab is to ensure that youth with mental health needs, or who are at risk for suicide, get the right treatment, at the right time, in an accessible setting. Specifically, our lab employs an implementation science approach to improve community capacity to identify and intervene for youth with mental health problems or at risk for suicide, including enhancing service delivery, efficiency, access, and engagement. Led by Dr. Jennifer Blossom, the C-CAP lab includes doctoral students, undergraduate research assistants, and multiple external collaborators (learn more about us here!). If you are interested in current research studies, interested in working with us, or want to learn more about youth mental health, we are glad you’re here!
The C-CAP Lab is no longer recruiting Undergraduate Research Assistants (URAs) for the Fall 2025 semester. To apply for future semesters, please visit the Undergrad RA Application page.
Consistent with the clinical psychology program update, Dr. Blossom will not be recruiting a Ph.D. student for the 2026-2027 school year. She does plan to take a new student during the next recruitment cycle.
C-CAP Lab News
September 2025- 🎉🎉🎉 Congratulations to Caroline for successfully passing her dissertation proposal! Her dissertation integrates three studies examining emotion regulation across development and how specific strategies contribute to, or protect against, internalizing distress. The third study will evaluate the preliminary effectiveness of FAST-E, a prevention program designed for caregivers of preschool-aged children with emotional and behavioral concerns, delivered in a primary care setting.
August 2025– 🎉🎉🎉 The American Psychological Association has named Dr. Blossom the recipient of the 2025 Excellence in Rural Psychology Award, recognizing her outstanding contributions to mental health care, research, and advocacy in rural communities! See the press release here.
June-July 2025– Aurora was an onsite summer research fellow at the Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders (CEED) at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Check out the blog post she wrote for the fellowship on interoceptive awareness.
May 2025– Dr. Blossom and some of the C-CAP grad students enjoyed our lovely end of year lab trip to Camden, ME. We went on a gorgeous hike, had a book exchange, and got some yummy food!
May 2025– Check out this press release about our John T. Gorman grant!
May 2025– Aurora and Katie attended the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) national conference in Minneapolis, MN.
April & May 2025– We had another wonderful annual end-of-year picnic to celebrate our graduating seniors and all of the hard work our undergraduate research assistants (URAs) did during the 2024-2025 school year. Huge congratulations to our graduating URAs: Aalliyah Ferreira, Dianna Ingersoll, Kacey Pustizzi, Alexis Ismail, and Alex Morgan!!
🎉 Aalliyah plans on attending Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to obtain her Master of Health Science in Health, Behavior and Society. This STEM designated program will train her in a variety of different research methods, across social disciplines within public health. This will ensure her preparedness to enter a Ph.D. program in public health or a related field. She looks forward to calling Baltimore home!
🎉 Dianna will be attending Merrimack College to pursue a Masters degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling! In her first year, she has been awarded a fellowship position in the Promoting Positive Mind-Body Health research lab, which focuses on positive youth development and helping adolescents with implementing positive mindsets regarding their mind-body health.
🎉 Eda Yavuz, who graduated last spring, officially accepted a research assistantship position in the Master of Arts in Psychological Sciences program at Montclair State University in New Jersey!
April 2025– Dianna and Aalliyah presented at the 2025 UMaine Symposium day
April 2025– Puneet and Hannah presented at the 2025 Anxiety and Depression Association of America Annual Conference (ADAA) in Las Vegas! 🎉 And a huge congrats to Puneet for winning the 2025 BIPOC Membership Scholarship!
Lab collaborator, Ono Okeh, Ph.D., also presented on a pilot implementation study of Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depressed Adolescents (IPT-A) and Behavioral Activation (BA) in a sample of justice-involved youth in the South-South Zone of Nigeria at the ADAA 2025 Conference. Hannah (graduate research assistant) and Aalliyah (undergraduate research assistant) also collaborated on the poster.
April 3, 2025– 🎉🎉🎉 Eleanor passed her dissertation proposal! Her dissertation, Addressing Disparities for Sexual and Gender Diverse Youth: Longitudinal trajectories, group differences, and brief treatment outcomes integrates key studies related to sexual and gender diverse youth mental health disparities. For Study 3, Eleanor’s work will also directly and immediately improve access to effective mental health treatment for sexual and gender diverse youth in Maine.
March 2025– Dr. Blossom and some of the C-CAP grad students after her talk, Managing Suicide Risk in Primary Care, at the 2025 Maine Integrated Behavioral Health Summit.
March 2025- 🎉🎉🎉 Dr. Blossom was just awarded a grant from the John T. Gorman Foundation, in collaboration with colleagues in the School of Social Work and at the Edmund N. Ervin Pediatric Center at Maine General: Expanding the Maine youth behavioral health workforce: Integrating evidence-based practice into graduate training.
This project will provide training in a flexible evidence-based youth mental health intervention (MATCH) for clinicians and graduate students in Maine, while also building a sustainable model to train future clinicians! Overall, this project aims to ensure that Maine youth in need of mental health treatment get access to effective, scientifically-supported treatment.
March 2025– Dr. Blossom, Aurora, and Katie gave a talk titled Building Community Connections to Improve Youth Suicide Prevention at the NAMI ME Beyond the Basics in Suicide Prevention: Planting Seeds of Hope conference in Portland, ME over spring break.
December 2024- The grad students and Dr. Blossom got together to celebrate another successful semester over dinner at Mason’s!
November, 2024– Eleanor, Aurora, Katie, and Dr. Blossom represented the C-CAP Lab at the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) conference in Philadelphia, PA.
September 2024- All 6 of our graduate students got together for a lovely fall outing to Acadia National Park (pics at Jordan Pond below!)
Dr. Blossom’s paper Evaluation of the First Approach Skills Training (FAST) Integrated Pediatric Primary Care Program: Implementation and Clinical Effectiveness is now in press on Taylor & Francis Online! Check it out here.