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- NIH T32 Postdoctoral Fellowship, Childhood Neuropsychiatric Disorders, Child Yale Child Study Center, New Haven, CT, (2022-2024)
- Internship, Clinical Psychology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, (2021-2022)
- PhD, Clinical Psychology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, (2016-2021)
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Alan H. Gerber, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and researcher whose work focuses on understanding and improving mental health outcomes for autistic individuals. His research addresses the high prevalence of internalizing symptoms—particularly loneliness, depression and anxiety—among autistic individuals. Dr. Gerber’s work aims to identify objective and modifiable mechanisms that contribute to mental health risk in autism, with the ultimate goal of informing targeted, developmentally sensitive interventions. His research emphasizes transdiagnostic processes, including social reward processing, executive functioning and emotion regulation, that shape social engagement and psychological well-being over time.
Dr. Gerber employs a multi-modal, longitudinal research approach that integrates neural, behavioral and real-world data to improve measurement precision and ecological validity. His studies combine electroencephalography (EEG) to index neural markers of reward and cognitive control, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to capture in-the-moment social experiences and emotional states and standardized behavioral and questionnaire measures. By integrating these complementary methods, his work examines how neural and behavioral mechanisms unfold across development and predict changes in mental health outcomes in everyday contexts. A central aim of this work is to identify measurable and potentially modifiable targets that can be leveraged to support personalized, mechanism-focused interventions and ultimately improve mental health and quality of life for autistic individuals.