Influenced by her cross-disciplinary training in clinical psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, Stefanie Sequeira studies how social threat and reward processes develop during adolescence and are linked to mental health. Stefanie integrates ecologically-valid methods at multiple levels of analysis into her work, including ecological momentary assessment (EMA), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), eye-tracking and passive sensing. Sequeira’s goal is to identify novel and modifiable social threat- and reward-related processes, measured at the levels of brain and behavior, that contribute to anxiety disorders and suicidal thoughts and behaviors in youth with anxiety disorders.

Sequeira received her Ph.D. in clinical-developmental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2023. As a doctoral student, Sequeira also trained in the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, and she completed a pre-doctoral clinical internship at Brown University. Sequeira’s doctoral work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology grant.  Sequeira completed her undergraduate studies in psychology at the University of Maryland (2014). 

As an assistant professor at UVA, Sequeira will continue doing what she loves: research, teaching, mentoring and service, including launching a new study funded by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention this fall that will examine longitudinal associations between social anhedonia and suicidal thoughts and behaviors in adolescents. Sequeira will teach child psychopathology in the spring in addition to a graduate course on psychological intervention. She will also be engaged in clinical training and supervision of graduate students in UVA’s Clinical Psychology program.