Ingrid Obsuth

Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology

Email: ingrid.obsuth@ed.ac.uk

Street: Doorway 6,
Teviot Place
City: Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9AG

Biography

Background

I am a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the School of Health in Social Science.

I received my PhD in Clinical Psychology from Simon Fraser University (SFU) in 2010, followed by a 2-year post-doctoral research fellowship at Harvard Medical School (HMS), Department of Psychiatry. Subsequently I worked for 5.5-years as a research associate at the University of Cambridge (UoC), Institute of Criminology.

The doctoral programme at SFU adheres to the scientist-practitioner training model that places equal emphasis on clinical and empirical expertise. Thus, from the outset of my academic career, I have combined my clinical work with research, deriving my research questions from my clinical experiences and bringing research-based knowledge to my clinical practice and teaching.

Teaching & PhD supervision

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I welcome enquiries about PhD supervision in areas of forensic and developmental psychology, as well as research in the intersection of psychology and criminology.

Research

Research summary

My research, clinical and teaching interests are in developmental psychology and psychopathology, with particular focus on adolescents, behavioural problems such as aggression and delinquency, victimisation and attachment with the goal to inform theory, policy and practice. For example, in one of my papers (Obsuth, et al., 2016), utilising propensity score matching, we found that teacher-student relationships at age 10/11 predicted young people’s behaviours up to four years later, while controlling for 106 potentially confounding variables of this link. I also have a special interest in the development and evaluation of manualised interventions and the development of innovative assessment tools. For instance, during my post-doctoral training at HMS, I collaborated on developing/validating an observational measure of adolescent-caregiver disorganised attachment (Obsuth, et al., 2015), while at UoC, I lead a large cluster-randomised trial to evaluate an intervention with the goal of reducing school exclusion (Obsuth et al., 2016, 2017). In addition, during my time at SFU, I collaborated on developing and evaluating an attachment-based manualised treatment programme for parents of youths with severe behavioural problems and histories of maltreatment (Obsuth, et al. 2009).

Current research interests

Victimisation (online and off), meta-verse, inter-partner violence, relationships

Projects

Project activity

I am currently working a three projects related to my above described research interests:

Attachment toward carers, teachers and others in children and adolescents in residential care
Teacher-student relationships in a variety of contexts
Understanding school exclusion
Learning Together - brings together people in criminal justice and higher education institutions to study alongside each other in inclusive and transformative learning communities (https://www.ccgsj.crim.cam.ac.uk/LT/What
Polyvictimisation