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Training and Supervision

Dr. Travers has experience providing educational and therapeutic training to a wide variety of audiences including parents, schools, and healthcare providers.

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concentric circular blue outline illustration

Training and Supervision

Dr. Travers has experience providing educational and therapeutic training to a wide variety of audiences including parents, schools, and healthcare providers.

illustration of blue arrow
concentric circular white outline illustration
concentric circular blue outline illustration

Training and Supervision

Dr. Travers has experience providing educational and therapeutic training to a wide variety of audiences including parents, schools, and healthcare providers.

illustration of blue arrow
concentric circular white outline illustration

Training

Dr. Travers has experience providing educational and therapeutic training to a wide variety of audiences including parents, schools, and healthcare providers.

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Sample training topics:

  • Gender differences in adolescent mental health

  • Techniques to manage child and adolescent anxiety at home and in the classroom

  • Fostering positive youth development

  • Best practices for diagnosing and supporting the female phenotype of autism/ASD

  • Multicultural understandings of autism/ASD

  • Diagnosis disclosure

  • Neurodiversity and gender identity

Supervision

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Dr. Travers is also available to provide supervision to newly licensed and/or seasoned clinicians. She has extensive experience supervising master’s and doctoral level students and clinicians within academia, school, community, and hospital settings.

Therapy supervision can include discussions of how to adapt traditional therapy techniques (e.g., CBT, DBT) for neurodiverse individuals and/or how to incorporate mind-body techniques into the therapy room.

Assessment supervision can support clinicians to develop specialized and individualized procedures for disconnecting complex learning and social-emotional profiles, including differential diagnoses (e.g., social anxiety versus autism/ASD) for children, teens, and young adults.

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Great presentation! People were so engaged. The talk was well-organized and broke down the research into real-life examples for parents and providers. You answered a range of audience questions thoughtfully and thoroughly, and it was clear people took home valuable information and resources to begin to implement in work and life.

Spotlight

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Female Presentation of Autism

Over the past 10 years, Dr. Travers has combined her interests in gender, mental health, and autism to develop a specific expertise in the female presentation of autism. The female presentation of autism was first widely discussed in 2015 by researchers Lai and colleagues. Since that time, awareness has grown regarding how autism can present differently across genders. Dr. Travers has extensive clinical and research expertise in this area. In addition to her ability to clinically diagnose autistic females across the lifespan, she is an expert on the available tools and methods for best practices in assessment. She is committed to sharing this knowledge with other professionals to ensure that autistic females are properly and timely diagnosed and receive optimal services and supports to help them feel empowered and succeed in today’s world. Dr. Travers maintains an active research program and is currently interested in investigating the role of interoception (the understanding of physiological cues and sensations such as hunger and fatigue) in the female presentation of autism. You can read more about her work here.

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Positive Youth Development and Mental Health

Dr. Travers has extensively studied adolescent development. She has interests in understanding gender differences in anxiety and depression among youth. She has studied how these mental health challenges may present differently in males and females as well as the factors that cause them to develop in the first place. Dr. Travers has used the framework of positive youth development to test whether there are attributes and skills that can be fostered in youth to help deter depression and anxiety. Positive youth development (PYD) is a process that facilitates the 5 C’s: competence, confidence, connection, caring and character (Lerner, 2009). Competence refers to holding the knowledge, skills, and abilities to complete tasks. Confidence is a positive self-belief about one’s skills and abilities. Connection is a sense of community with others. Caring is a sense of compassion and concern for others. Character refers to a set of values, such as integrity and honesty, that help guide everyday decisions. Cultivating the 5 C’s in youth has been linked to a range of positive outcomes within the domains of mental health, identity development, substance use and personal achievement. Dr. Travers’ research has shown that PYD is especially important for deterring symptoms of depression in adolescent females. The full research article can be viewed here. Dr. Travers uses this area of expertise to inform educational and therapeutic recommendations as part of her comprehensive range of services, including child-centered evaluations and when consulting with parents, schools, and health care professionals more broadly.

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