NIMH T32 Postdoctoral Fellow · Medical University of South Carolina
Quantitative developmental psychologist
I study how family relationships, communication, social experience, and behavioral interventions shape substance-use risk, trauma recovery, and behavioral health from adolescence into emerging adulthood.
Research program
My work joins developmental psychology, prevention science, and quantitative methodology. The projects differ in setting, but they share a question: are we representing the construct precisely enough to support the conclusion we want to draw?
I lead a $40,000 Oregon Social Learning Center pilot validating parallel measures of how parents communicate about alcohol and marijuana. The study links parent and adolescent reports and asks whether distinct messages retain their meaning across substances, reporters, and development.
SOAR-T is a survivor-completed profile of the conditions that support or obstruct recovery and access to care. I lead its domain and item development with survivors, trauma professionals, paraprofessionals, and service-system reviewers before large-sample psychometric evaluation.
On two NIDA-funded projects, I lead or provide quantitative direction for work on intervention fidelity and experimental mediation. The goal is to show what was delivered, which skills need further training, and whether parenting practices help explain change in adolescent substance-use outcomes.
I contribute quantitative expertise to a proposed non-inferiority trial of remotely delivered contingency management administered by trained paraprofessionals. In parallel, I am conducting a meta-analysis that evaluates efficacy alongside implementation and implementability.
My longitudinal research examines how disaster exposure, temperament, aggression, and peer victimization work together to shape adolescent substance-use initiation and frequency. The findings show why exposure alone is an incomplete marker of risk: its consequences depend on the person experiencing it and the social context in which it occurs.
Quantitative approach
Software can produce an estimate. Scientific judgment determines whether it answers the question.
I begin with the construct and the claim: what does a score represent, for whom, and under what conditions? I then choose a model that makes that claim testable, examine the assumptions beneath it, and translate the result without stripping away its limits or its human meaning.
Selected scholarship
Hakim, E. A., McDonald, K. L., Lochman, J. E., Powell, N. P., & Vernberg, E. M.
View publicationHakim, E. A., McDonald, K. L., Lochman, J. E., Powell, N. P., Witte, T. H., & Vernberg, E. M.
View publicationHakim, E. A., & McDonald, K. L.
Hakim, E. A., & McDonald, K. L.
Teaching and mentorship
I did not begin graduate school loving statistics. It clicked when I was asked to explain ANOVA in my own words before mastering its machinery. I now build that same movement—from question, to evidence, to conclusion—into my teaching.
I teach the mathematics, assumptions, code, diagnostics, and interpretation as connected parts of a scientific argument. Students should be able to choose a method for a defensible reason, execute it correctly, identify where its conclusion could fail, and explain what the result means for the people represented in the data.
Courses included enrollments of more than 100 students.
Contact
I welcome conversations about measurement, longitudinal research, substance-use prevention, trauma recovery, intervention science, and quantitative collaboration.