2022 Abidin Early Career Award & Grant: Joseph McGuire, PhD

2022 Abidin Early Career Award & Grant: Joseph McGuire, PhD

SCCAP is delighted to present this year’s Richard “Dick” Abidin Early Career Award and Grant to Joseph McGuire. The award honors Richard “Dick” Abidin, longtime member and treasurer of SCCAP. It is intended to recognize an early career psychologist whose line of research has significantly contributed to our understanding of child and adolescent mental health, and to support the awardee in extending their current program of research.

Dr. McGuire is a very worthy candidate of the Abidin Early Career Award and Grant. He currently serves as an associate professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Services at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and directs the JHU Center for OCD, Anxiety and Related Disorders for Children (COACH). Dr. McGuire’s research program focuses on the assessment and treatment of pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), tic disorders, and hair-pulling disorder. His research has been supported by the NIH and numerous foundations.

Dr. McGuire’s research efforts have directly contributed to improving the clinical care of youth suffering from OCD and tic disorders. He has been involved in revising both the Children’s Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS) and the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale (YGTSS). He also led efforts to establish objective benchmarks of treatment improvement for pediatric anxiety, OCD and tic disorders.  His research on treatment mechanisms has clarified and highlighted the role of inhibitory learning in exposure treatment for youth with OCD. Moreover, Dr. McGuire’s involvement in meta-analyses of treatment effects for OCD, tic disorders, hair-pulling disorder, and excoriation disorder provided the field with treatment-related effect size estimates and identified relevant moderators of treatment.

Thus far, Dr. McGuire has authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He has also co-authored four books, including The Clinician’s Guide to the Treatment and Management of Youth with Tourette Syndrome and Tic Disorders.  Dr. McGuire was previously the recipient of ABCT’s Anne Marie Albano Early Career Award and the ABCT President’s New Researcher Award.

As the Abidin Early Career Award winner, Dr. McGuire will receive $20,000 from SCCAP to support a project in his line of research. He plans to use these funds to further current research efforts examining the efficacy and utility of virtual reality (VR) exposure-based interventions to treat OCD. Dr. McGuire will conduct a multimodal test of whether VR exposures provoke a desired response in youth with OCD compared to a control group. Please join us in recognizing Dr. McGuire as this year’s Abidin Early Career Award recipient!