Alison Parker, Ph.D.
Research Scientist
Alison Parker, PhD, is a Research Scientist at innovation Research & Training. Dr. Parker received a PhD in Developmental Psychology from North Carolina State University. Her research background is in life-span developmental psychology with specific training and expertise in the area of child and adolescent development, family relations, and parent socialization. At iRT, she has expanded her knowledge into the areas of eLearning and development of online and in-person trainings, assessments, and prevention programming with the goal of improving the health and well-being of youth and adults. She has led the development as PI or Co-I in the development and evaluation of numerous web-based trainings, resources, and assessment tools for youth and adults as part of federally funded projects. She has experience conducting both qualitative studies (e.g., focus groups, interviews) and quantitative studies (e.g., usability; evaluation).
Janis B. Kupersmidt, Ph.D.
President and Senior Research Scientist
Dr. Kupersmidt is the President and Senior Research Scientist of Innovation Research & Training (iRT), which she founded in 1999. iRT’s mission is to develop empirically validated assessment tools and intervention programs to improve the health and well-being of children, adolescents, and young adults. At iRT, Dr. Kupersmidt leads a multi-disciplinary team that has received both public and private funding on a range of topics to conduct basic and applied research, as well as provide training and technical assistance services. iRT has expertise in designing, creating, and rigorously evaluating products and services in the areas of youth mentoring, social-emotional learning, media literacy education for substance abuse prevention and reproductive health, mindfulness education, web-based assessments of emotion recognition and social information processing skills, and psycho educational group therapy with substance abusing delinquent adolescents.
The iRT research team led by Dr. Kupersmidt has developed two media literacy substance abuse prevention programs, Media Detective, for elementary school-aged children, and Media Ready, for middle school-aged children. Both programs are reviewed by the SAMHSA National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (NREPP) related to substance abuse prevention efforts.
Dr. Kupersmidt is very committed to enhancing the blending of research-and-practice activities through working closely with nonprofit and community-based organizations and providers. During the development cycle, iRT works collaboratively with end-users to develop feasible, usable, and attractive products. In addition, iRT has provided strategic consulting on program development and information technology for assessment and monitoring purposes; training and continuing education; development and evaluation of preventive and treatment intervention programs; and outcome and process program evaluations of multi-site programs.
Richard Van Horn, M.S.
Senior Web Application Developer
Richard Van Horn, as part of the software development team, has worked closely with researchers to implement and maintain various projects, by integrating course content into web applications, and creating functionality as needed by projects. He is experienced in web application design, development, and testing, and he has contributed to multiple mindfulness projects at iRT. He has a M.S. in Information Technology with an emphasis in software development and management from Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley.
Kim Gosnell
Art Director
Kim Gosnell is the Art Director at iRT, where she works with an incredibly talented array of people to create engaging, interactive learning experiences. She has a B.A. in Multimedia and Web Design (Interactive Media) from the Art Institute of Phoenix, an E-Learning Instructional Design Certificate from ATD, and fifteen years of experience in the creative fields; art direction, graphic design and print production, e-learning design and development for web, tablet and mobile devices, animation, motion graphics and video production, instructional design/course development and implementation, web design, cartoon and technical illustration, marketing, content writing and more. She has led the graphic design, multimedia production, and development of many online training courses (e-learning modules designed for both self-paced and instructor-led training programs) and print-based materials for various youth mindfulness programs at iRT.
Kim’s ideal day at work consists of drawing cartoons.
Liz Reeder
Research Assistant
Liz has a background in cognitive psychology research, focusing on psycholinguistics and comparing presentation methods of tasks. She received her Bachelors of Science in Psychology and minor in Hispanic Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She worked in the Arnold Lab in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience as a research assistant where she worked on both production and comprehension experiments in psycholinguistics. She was inspired to take up her own research by way of a senior honors thesis on The Author Recognition Task: Does Presentation Matter? She presented her findings at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 2017 and later successfully defended her thesis. She currently works on iRT’s mindfulness project under Dr. Alison Parker and feels the study readily bridges her cognitive psychology interests with social and developmental psychology.