Following the news that our colleague, Dr. Carmen Valdez, will begin a new position at the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2018, CCHE is pleased to announce that Dr. Stephanie Budge will serve as the new Faculty Director for the AHEAD program.
“I’m delighted that Stephanie has agreed to step into the AHEAD Faculty Director role!” says Dr. Valdez. “She is a wonderful colleague, an excellent communicator, and an inclusive and affirmative researcher and mentor. I am confident that the AHEAD Program is in capable hands and I so appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of this leadership opportunity between the UW SMPH and the School of Education. This is good for Stephanie and for all participants in the AHEAD initiative.”
Dr. Budge is an assistant professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology at UW-Madison and focuses her research and activism efforts on transgender and gender diverse people. Her research focuses on emotional and coping processes for transgender youth and adults, as well as the effectiveness of medical and psychotherapeutic treatments for transgender clients. She provides clinical trainings nationally and internationally related to LGBTQ issues, focusing on practitioners’ self-efficacy, knowledge, awareness, and skills. At the University of Wisconsin, she promotes transgender activism on campus by providing workshops to students, faculty, and staff related to navigating gender identity within a university environment. For her research efforts, she received the American Psychological Association LGBT Outstanding Community Contributions award (2011) and the APA LGBT Early Career Professional Award (2015) from the Society for Counseling Psychology.
Dr. Budge was a recipient of a 2017 ICTR AHEAD Pilot Grant for her project, “Psychotherapy minority stress interventions for transgender patients: A pilot randomized controlled trial,’ and she’s looking forward to her new role with the program. “I am very excited to join the AHEAD program as the incoming faculty director. I look forward to mentoring individuals investigating health equity and interdisciplinary translational research,” she says.
Welcome to the ICTR-CCHE Family, Dr. Budge!