By Mackenzie Grizzard | Staff Writer
Dr. Christine Limbers is the director of the Psy.D. graduate program and leads Baylor’s pediatric psychology laboratory. She is one of Baylor’s premier research faculty, appearing for the second year in a row on Stanford University’s database of the most-cited researchers in the world.
“There is lots of different research that goes in within the lab,” Limbers said. “It all sort of ties back to trying to enhance [the] health and well-being of children and their families.”
The pediatric psychology lab focuses specifically on the “development and validation of outcome measures and evidence-based pediatric interventions for children with chronic health conditions,” according to the website.
Despite the emphasis on children’s health within the lab, Limbers and her researchers also focus on family dynamics, stress measures, chronic illness and obesity.
“Several of my doctoral students in my lab have helped develop patient-reported outcome measures such as tools that assess emotional eating in children and adolescence,” Limbers said. “You can see some of the work we’ve done is looking at how family systems are impacted by a child having a chronic health condition.”
Limbers worked in research labs at Arizona State, Texas A&M and Duke before arriving at Baylor in 2010.
“I really liked that Baylor was a Christian university, and that was something I found that was really unique and aligned with my values.” Limbers said. “I also liked that Baylor at the time was having an increased focus on research, so it was a really exciting time to be at Baylor.”
Within clinical programs, Limbers completed her APA-accredited internship at Duke University, which affirmed her goal of working in pediatric research, she said.
“I had the opportunity to work both in inpatient and outpatient with children who were hospitalized with various chronic health conditions such as cancer, sickle cell disease [and] epilepsy,” Limbers said. “Having that sort of hands-on experience of conducting assessments and therapy with those population really solidified wanting to pursue research in the area of pediatric psychology.”
Within the classroom, Limbers also takes a clinical approach similar to the pediatric lab.
“Typically in my classes, students will read from a textbook and journal articles, but then we’ll also watch demonstrations of a particular assessment being administered or of a particular therapy technique,” Limbers said.
Limbers also works closely with a number of graduate students. Brook Park, Ohio third-year graduate student Tatum Zeleznik has worked with Limbers in the pediatric psychology lab for three years.
“Dr. Limbers takes a very flexible response to the lab, [and] she’s very responsive to our own needs and wants, in terms of either designing our own research study like I did in my first and second year, or even helping out with other studies to get more publications or going to conferences,” Zeleznik said.
For the past three years, Zeleznik has been working on her dissertation, which focuses on measuring parent stress of children with chronic health conditions, specifically autism, using what she calls a pediatric inventory.
“It’s been validated and used with parents of children with different chronic health conditions,” Zeleznik said. “Dr. Limbers did a study for fathers of children with type 1 diabetes and other things like cystic fibrosis, but it hasn’t been validated for parents of children with autism. So basically, we’re going to be administering it to a bunch of parents of kids with autism to see if it’s a sufficiently reliable and valid measure to use with that population.”
Throughout her time at the lab, Zeleznik has appreciated the opportunity to work closely with Limbers and have new experiences in a research capacity.
“So overall, it’s a great experience,” Zeleznik said. “She really is the best mentor I think any of us could ask for in terms of her responsiveness, flexibility and willingness to help and support us in the types of research endeavors we want to pursue.”
