Henry A. Willis

Spotlight on a Researcher

• Name: Henry A. Willis
• Degree: PhD, Clinical Psychology, Concentration in Quantitative Psychology
• Pronouns: he/him/his
• Institution: University of Maryland – College Park
• How long have you been a member of ABCT? Approximately 7-8 years

Henry A. Willis, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist and is originally from Jackson, Mississippi. He received his B.S. in psychology from Howard University and his M.A. in clinical psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Willis received his Ph.D. from the Clinical Psychology program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and completed an APA-accredited predoctoral internship at Montefiore Hospital/Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Subsequently, he completed postdoctoral research training at Columbia University’s School of Social Work and the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice. He completed his postdoctoral clinical training working with children and adults at Madison Park Psychological Services in New York City.

Dr. Willis is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Clinical Psychology program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the creator and director of the Cultural Resilience, Equity, and Technology (CREATE) Research Lab at UMD College Park. His program of research includes exploring the relationship between online and offline racial discrimination and mental health outcomes among African American youth and young adults, understanding sociocultural protective factors (i.e., racial identity) and how they impact psychopathology within African Americans, creating cultural adaptations of evidence-based treatments, and utilizing mobile-health technologies to increase access to mental health treatments for underserved populations.

How did you first become involved in research? What was this first research experience like?

My very first research experience was actually in high school! I was enrolled in the international baccalaureate (IB) program, and because of this, I was able to take an introduction to psychology course. One of our big projects in the class was to conduct a psychological experiment based on one of the foundational concepts that we learned, and I chose to explore attention and reconstructive memory. I designed my own experiment to test the reconstructive memory of 8^th grade students, and I was able to travel to my old middle school and conduct the study/collect data. I’m too old to remember my hypothesis or results, but what I do remember is the joy of creating a research question, collecting and analyzing data, and presenting my findings to my peers.

I had always been a “good” student in terms of getting good grades in school, but this was the first time that I can remember that I was actually excited to do classwork and genuinely enjoyed the subject matter. This set the stage for me to write my first research paper as a high school senior, which was a literature review about how sociocultural factors influence differences in academic outcomes among Black adolescent boys and girls. Together, these experiences solidified my desire to make psychology my primary focus when I started college.

How do you balance research with the other demands of your position?

Trying to balance research with the other demands that come along with being an assistant professor and clinician can be really challenging! I often have to mentally transition from teaching or mentoring, to analyzing data or writing a manuscript, to seeing patients, or to supervising other clinicians, all in the span of one work day. This might sound chaotic, but it’s also one of the things I love about the job – no two days look the same.

I balance all of these competing demands by first knowing my own limits, so I don’t plan to write on days where I’m teaching a lot or doing other time-consuming things like meetings, but I also protect those “less busy” days to catch up on important/upcoming research or writing deadlines. I also make sure that I never let these different demands take away from the things that are important to me in my personal life: working out, spending time with loved ones, reading fiction and comic books, playing video games, and watching reality TV.

Most importantly, when I’m not focusing on work demands, I remind myself that I’m not “falling behind” and that spending time engaging in my personal hobbies is what gives me the energy to do research and clinical work.

What drew you to your particular area of research?

My area of research explores how sociocultural factors, both risk factors such as exposure to racism, and protective factors, such as racial identity beliefs, influence mental health trajectories for Black and Brown youth and young adults. Going to Howard University, a historically Black institution, Black people were always at the center of the psychological theories and concepts that I was taught, so it should come as no surprise as to one reason why I focus my research on Black communities. But, when I was pursuing my master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, I had experiences that solidified my passion for exploring disparities in mental health outcomes.

Specifically, when I was a research assistant in an anxiety disorders clinic, I saw that despite our research lab being centered in a predominantly Latinx community and being nearby a predominantly Black community, our clinical research studies did not reflect this diversity. This made me begin to question how effective our “gold standard” treatments for psychological disorders really were if the empirical evidence didn’t include diverse people. It also made me wonder how we may be missing how key aspects of one’s experience (e.g., exposure to racial discrimination or one’s racial identity beliefs) may influence both psychological symptoms and treatment outcomes.

In short, this experience highlighted how Black and Brown people were underrepresented in clinical psychology research. This is what drew me to ultimately explore how these various social and cultural factors influence mental health and mental health outcomes for Black people and other communities of color, and to use this research to increase representation of marginalized communities in psychological research and hopefully reduce disparities in mental healthcare.

If you weren’t pursuing a career in psychology, what would you be doing?

Outside of psychology, my two other major loves are music and technology. In terms of music, I grew up in a very musical household and community, and I began playing musical instruments when I was 7 (my first instrument was the violin). My primary instrument is the alto saxophone, and I’ve been playing it since I was 11 or 12. I played it all the way through undergrad (and even had a band scholarship at the time), and I was actually a double-major in both psychology and music before I decided to focus exclusively on psychology. So, if I weren’t pursuing a career in psychology, I would probably have some type of career in music – with a combination of performing, writing, and production.

Similarly, I’ve also been a lover of all things technology since I was 7. I received my first computer around that time, and it was a Windows ’96 Dell computer (some things you never forget!). As a child, I fell in love with learning the ins and outs of the hardware and software (and breaking things a few times), and over my lifetime, I’ve had just about every type of emerging technology or video game that’s come out. I even worked in classroom IT support during my time pursuing my master’s degree! So with that being said, if I weren’t pursuing a career in psychology, I could also see myself doing something in the technology realm, possibly designing video games.