Undergraduate Research Assistants

Dr. Christensen Pacella and the Clinic for Research on Eating, Sleep, and Therapy (CREST) welcome proactive, enthusiastic, and responsible students who wish to conduct research on eating disorders.  We study a variety of topics, but broadly speaking, our work seeks to understand potential modifiable factors that could be incorporated into eating disorder treatments and to make treatments more accessible to people who need them. Our research uses a variety of approaches including surveys, lab-based tasks, interviews, physiological measures, and clinical treatment protocols.

We are not currently recruiting research assistants, but if you’re interested in joining CREST, please complete our application and a member of our team will contact you when we have open positions. Questions about your application should be directed to our lab coordinator at crest@unlv.edu not Dr. Christensen Pacella.

Graduate Student Admissions FAQ

Dr. Christensen Pacella may be taking a student for the 2026-2027 application cycle.

Thank you for considering me as a potential mentor for graduate school in clinical psychology! I am considering admitting one graduate student for the 2027-2028 academic year. This FAQ is intended to answer common questions people may have about my lab and my mentorship.

This cycle, I am recruiting students interested in studying the connection between sleep and eating disorder pathology. I am unlikely to admit students with research focuses outside this area.

What do you study?

Here are some of the research directions we are pursuing right now in the lab. Some are being led by my team and others are being conducted in conjunction with collaborators at external institutions. My research is currently being funded by NIGMS, NIMH, and the Department of Defense.

1. Sleep and Eating Disorders
   1. Sleep (particularly insomnia symptoms) in relation to eating disorder etiology, maintenance, and treatment.
2. Digital Health
   1. Designing and testing digital health products to increase access to eating disorders care
3. Food Insecurity
   1. Understanding the relationship between the experience of food insecurity and eating disorder symptoms
4. Assessment and Diagnosis
   1. Creating, improving, and evaluating measures to assess eating disorder symptoms, particularly among understudied populations, and studying the nosology (classification) of eating disorder symptoms

I certainly do not expect you to be interested in only the things I am interested in, but I want you to know what my priorities are for larger-scale lab projects. I also am comfortable advising students who are focused on topics related to emotion regulation, ED treatment development, and interpersonal relationships. In my ideal world, you would find your own niche related to eating disorders that you are passionate about (and that I can appropriately advise you on) and you would take it and run with it.

I may be open to co-mentorship with others in the department depending on your interests.

I am interested in projects going forward to use open science approaches, such as preregistration, sharing data and code, and preprinting to allow more access to our work, increased accountability, and to share resources.

What don’t you study?

In the past, I did quite a bit of work with psychophysiology (particularly heart rate variability). I don’t really work in that area now and I don’t have the equipment anymore.

There are some other topics related to eating behaviors that I don’t study for a variety of reasons. I am not a good match for students whose research interests are in food addiction, weight loss interventions, weight management, bariatric surgery, neuropsych-based questions/treatments, neuroimaging, neurocognitive assessment, feeding disorders (ARFID, pica, etc.), and genetic approaches. My philosophical approach to ED treatments and prevention is anti-diet so if you have a strong desire to study weight management, then I am not the right person to mentor you.

At this time, my work focuses on adults. I do not have plans to study eating pathology in children or adolescents per se and I am not trained as a child psychologist. However, I do a lot of work with emerging adults (18-25) and am interested in interpersonal dynamics in eating disorders, including family units, so there may be a way to accommodate some very specific research questions related to non-adult populations.

If you are unsure whether or not I’d be an appropriate mentor for your interests, you may want to shoot me an email (but see below).

Does emailing you about my application or interest impact graduate admissions?

Not in the least. I know that writing these emails takes time and is often very stressful to you. Therefore, you don’t need to email me about working in my lab unless there is a question that isn’t addressed here. I do not keep track of who emails me and it is never taken into account for admissions because I want to keep the admissions process as fair as possible. To learn more about our admissions procedure please view: https://www.unlv.edu/psychology/graduateprograms/phd-clinical-admission.

This is me giving you permission to not email me and expressly telling you that it will in no way impact your admission likelihood. This is not a trick or a test.

If you email me with a question, I will do my very best to respond to you. Please do not read anything into it if the response is relatively short, there’s a delay in response, or I refer you back to this guide.

Why UNLV?

UNLV is a scientist-practitioner program. We are an R1 institution, meaning we have high research productivity. There are three graduate programs affiliated with the Psychology Department, including the clinical program, as well as a certificate program in quantitative psychology (read more about our program here: https://www.unlv.edu/psychology/graduateprograms/phd-clinical). The clinical program offers funding opportunities through assistantships and summer funding may be available through the program or through my startup/grants. Your clinical training will initially be run through the PRACTICE, an on-campus community mental health clinic and in following years, you can apply to the many external practicum sites throughout the city. Nevada is a state that is severely lacking in mental health services (with very few resources for people with eating disorders), so you will see firsthand how the work that you do will make a difference.

Isn’t Las Vegas just a bunch of casinos and tourists and Cirque du Soleil shows?

Not at all (although there are a lot of Cirque du Soleil shows)! There is a lot to do beyond the Las Vegas strip. Las Vegas is a very diverse city of about 2.3 million people and rapidly growing. The food is amazing and you can get basically anything you might ever want to try at any price point. Just outside the city, there is some great hiking and nature in the mountains (often 20-30 degrees cooler than down in the valley).

Photo by BLM District: Southern Nevada District Photographer: Michael Balen

There are something like 17 national parks within driving distance (just a sampling: Death Valley, Yosemite, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon, Zion, Mesa Verde, Joshua Tree). Your friends and family will actually want to visit you here for vacation (this was not true for me when I went to graduate school at Ohio State or postdoc at University of Kansas). Locals get some discounts on the strip, if you decide you want to chill in a lazy river one day. If you’re a sports person, there are the Raiders (football), the beloved Golden Knights (hockey), and minor league baseball, and Vegas is the capitol of combat sports (UFC, boxing). Downtown Las Vegas and the Arts District hosts First Fridays, which is a large monthly street festival with food trucks, open art galleries, shopping, and entertainment. Many major musicians perform here (or have their own residencies). Do you like campy things? You will be in heaven.

Do you have collaborators?

 I strongly believe in team science approaches. A few people I am working on projects with right now are listed below with their research interests.

• Kelsie Forbush (Professor, University of Kansas): eating disorder assessment and diagnosis, digital mental health, EDs in military and veteran populations
• Angeline Bottera (Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University): circadian rhythms and eating behaviors, integrating sleep and eating disorder treatments
• Kelsey Hagan (Assistant Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University): eating disorders, psychometrics, reward processing
• Leah Irish (Associate Professor, North Dakota State University): sleep and eating pathology
• Kyle De Young (Professor, University of Wyoming): eating disorders, circadian rhythm dysfunction
• Heather Davis (Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech University): food insecurity, substance use
• Ilana Seager van Dyk (Senior Lecturer, Massey University, New Zealand): emotion regulation, sexual and gender minority mental health, youth mental health
• Matt Southward (Assistant Professor, Ohio State University): therapy processes, emotion regulation, Unified Protocol, transdiagnostic approaches, multilevel modeling
• Nicole Short (Assistant Professor, UNLV): stress, trauma, sleep, substance use
• Daniel Taylor (Professor, University of Arizona): sleep treatments
• Shane Kraus (Associate Professor, UNLV): behavioral addictions, substance use
• Brianne Richson (Post-doctoral Fellow, Sanford Research): Assessment and diagnosis, psychometrics
• Vivienne Hazzard (Assistant Professor, Michigan State University): food insecurity

I want to be a clinician and do not particularly care about research. Should I apply to work with you?

That is fantastic and we need more well-trained clinicians. I think it is a shame that often people have to hide their true interests in clinical work when applying to graduate school.

My preference right now is for students who are interested in either balanced clinical-research careers or primarily research careers. I likely am not going to be the best mentor to someone who only wants to do clinical work and is not interested in working on research in graduate school because my expectations for research production with my students will be high. I care deeply about clinical work and clinical training and will support my students in getting high quality experiences and becoming amazing clinicians and researchers. If you decide along the way that research isn’t for you, I will equally support you in navigating your career.

On the other hand, if you are only interested in research and do not like clinical work, my lab may also not be the best fit as we do a large amount of clinical assessment which requires you to work closely with participants. We also will likely be expanding to treatment trials in the near future. Furthermore, as a clinical psychologist trainee, you will be doing a significant amount of clinical work and then your full-time residency. If this does not appeal to you, other paths may meet your needs better.

I want to go into industry/altac/advocacy/public policy. Should I apply to work with you?

Sure! There are some really great opportunities outside traditional academic and clinical pathways. Do I know everything about them? No. But I am happy to support you and connect you to resources as best I can.

What is your mentorship style?

I use a colleague-based model, meaning that from the beginning you will be treated as a peer. We will work collaboratively to identify areas of growth for you. I would say that my mentorship is “moderately” hands on. By this, I mean that I will work with you in the beginning to learn basic skills and techniques, but will expect you to then go off and practice on your own. I also will expect you to refer to books, papers, and other resources to teach yourself some skills. I don’t expect you to do everything by yourself, but I think the process of researching and trial and error is important to you learning the “how” and “why” behind things that we do. I will expect us to meet regularly and will provide prompt feedback on your documents. I am invested in my trainees’ well-being and helping them to achieve their goals. I also believe that work-life balance in graduate school is not only possible, but essential. I will do my best to support you and help make the program work for you. I do not want you in my lab all day and night and I want you to have interests outside of our work.

If you are offered a position in my lab, you will have the opportunity to meet with current graduate students and collaborators. Please wait to contact members of my team until you reach this point.

What kind of students do you want to recruit?

This year I am recruiting for a student interested in studying sleep and eating disorders. Prior research experience in either disordered eating/eating disorders or sleep is required.

I am looking for people with high intellectual curiosity, who are generous teammates, and who want to do good science.  If you have advanced statistics, database management, or programming knowledge, that would be very appealing to me (so highlight it in your app!). Detail-oriented and self-motivated individuals are the most likely to thrive in my lab environment. I like working with people who are always thinking of new ideas and how to test them.

I don’t require you to have a first-author publication or a bunch of conference presentations when you apply. I do want to see evidence that you have experience with research and are knowledgeable about the expectations of a PhD program. I am most likely to recruit people who have post-bac research experience, a master’s degree, or who have demonstrated advanced research knowledge through independent projects such as honors theses; however, this is not a requirement. I know that there is a high level of privilege in being able to have these kinds of experiences. In your personal statement, you’ll want to lay out a good case for how your experiences have given you the skills to be successful in graduate school.

Do you have specific expectations for my research output and clinical work?

This will depend on your career goals and experience level. I will expect my students, regardless of if they want to be clinicians, to be strong research scientists. This means publishing in peer-reviewed journals and presenting at conferences. I hope that you will be able to submit at least one first author paper in your first year and then submit 1-3 per year in subsequent years, depending on the type of projects that you are working on. You will have the opportunity to be a co-author on your peers’ projects and my papers. I will also do my best to get you involved in other projects and grants that I have going on with my collaborators, depending on your interests and skills. If you are research-focused, I will strongly encourage applying for a NIH F31. If you’re not a US citizen, we will try to figure out what other funding sources might be available.

Clinical work is extremely important and I want you to be a great clinician and diagnostician. I will expect you to devote the time to your clinical work that it deserves. I would like you to deliver evidence-based therapies like a pro and be confident in providing clinical care. Students in my lab are expected to become proficient in eating disorders assessment, including the Eating Pathology Symptoms Inventory- Clinician Rated Interview and the SCID. This is acquired through a highly intensive training process during your first year that is completed alongside the team from the CARE Lab at the University of Kansas. You also will be trained in the QuickSCID and/or MINI. Most of my students will serve as assessors on various reseach projects.

Why might I want to work with early career faculty?

For the right person, there is a lot of opportunity in working with an early career researcher, such as myself.  So let me also share some of the fun stuff that I can offer!

1. I have to get tenure, so these first few years are going to be about me maximizing my (and your) publishing and going for grants. You can expect to be involved in as many projects as you can handle and work closely alongside me. I have quite a bit of data to work through the publication process and am looking forward to having mentees lead some analyses!
2. You will be at the ground level of getting the lab set up and launching new projects. This can be a valuable experience for people who are interested in starting their own labs.
3. You’ll get a lot of attention. You will not be competing for my mentorship with a big lab of other graduate students, postdocs, and RAs.
4. I have startup money that needs to be spent, which includes funds for research projects and conferences
5. My internship, postdoc, licensure, and job search experiences are more recent, so I may be able to provide more current information on these topics

What is your contact information?

Email: kara.christensen@unlv.edu

Lab website: https://crest.sites.unlv.edu/

Faculty profile: https://www.unlv.edu/people/kara-Pacella

Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kara-Christensen-Pacella

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IQtN7ggAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Hopefully this has given you an overview about UNLV, the lab, and my mentorship. Please contact me if there are any questions not addressed here that are pertinent to your application. Good luck with your graduate school applications, whether they are at UNLV or elsewhere, and I hope you find your best match!