Carla Mazefsky, Ph.D.

Carla Mazefsky is a licensed clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh. She completed her undergraduate training at The College of William and Mary, followed by a doctoral program in Clinical Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, pre-doctoral internship at Brown University, and post-doctoral fellowship at Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics. She first joined the University of Pittsburgh in 2006 as an Assistant Professor in Pediatrics at the Child Development Unit, where she spent half of her time doing autism diagnostic evaluations and half of her time doing research. She had her first grant during that time, focused on psychiatric diagnoses in autistic teenagers. She shifted into Psychiatry in 2009 and received an NICHD Career Development Award. She has been fully funded by and focused on research related to emotion dysregulation in autism ever since.

Most of Carla’s research centers around understanding, assessing, and supporting emotion regulation in autism, with a particular focus on adolescence and adulthood. Early in her career, she received the Ritvo-Slifka Award for Innovation in Autism Research which provided the foundation for the early development of the Emotion Dysregulation Inventory, a questionnaire she authored and validated (later with NICHD R01 funding) that is now in use in six continents and almost 50 countries across the world. This instilled a passion in measure development, and she has continued to be involved in several other measure-related projects, most recently focused on suicide in autism. She also co-authored the Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement Program (EASE) with Drs. Kelly Beck, Susan White, and Caitlin Conner and was PI of a randomized controlled trial of EASE and is MPI of a comparative effectiveness trial of EASE in ten community mental health clinics (together with Dr. Susan White). She hopes that all of her work leads to improved mental health and quality of life for autistic people.

Carla is excited about the wonderful team within REAACT and growth of autism research at the University of Pittsburgh. She loves mentoring early career researchers. She is committed to ensuring the REAACT program is inclusive, hopefully touching on topics that matter to those across the entire autism spectrum and including autistic adults in all stages of the research. The accomplishment she is most proud of is her recent Autism Center of Excellence (ACE P50) award from the NIMH focused on adult mental health and suicide.

When she is not working, Carla spends most of her time focused on her three children (11, 14, and 16) and two big bernadoodles....and doing mountains of laundry. She loves walking her dogs, watching her kids do what they love, and traveling when she has the chance. Back when she was 18 (before cell phones were a thing!), she spent a year as an AFS exchange student in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium (and yes, learned to speak Flemish fluently!). She attended a specialized art school while there, her past love that she hopes to get back into some day.