Featured Faculty
Cassandra Berbary
College of Health Sciences and Technology
Dr. Cassandra Berbary is a Research Assistant Professor in the College of Health Science and Technology at RIT. She is a licensed psychologist and dually appointed with Rochester Regional Health. Dr. Berbary received her PhD in School Psychology from Duquesne University in 2017, Master’s Degree in Child Psychology from Duquesne University in 2013, and Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from SUNY Geneseo in 2012. She was formerly a pre-doctoral intern and post-doctoral associate with the Behavioral Health program at RIT.
Dr. Berbary specializes in working with children, adolescents, and their families. Her clinical work focuses on youth diagnostic assessment as well as program implementation and training for clinicians and pre-doctoral interns. Specifically, Dr. Berbary supervises the clinical training of pre-doctoral interns with RIT’s Priority Behavioral Health Clinic and Rochester Regional Health’s mental health outpatient clinics.
Alongside faculty members Dr. Caroline Easton and Dr. Cory Crane, Dr. Berbary’s research focuses on utilizing advancements in technology within mental health treatment. Dr. Berbary’s specific research centers on the development of technology-based tools for youth mental health and substance use treatment. She is currently leading the development of an avatar-assisted cognitive behavioral therapy platform for treatment of substance use and co-occurring psychiatric distress among youth.
Dr. Berbary was recently awarded a $1.5 million Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) grant to increase training opportunities and the number of psychology interns trained to provide interdisciplinary behavioral health services for children, adolescents, and transitional youth in highly underserved communities of Monroe County in upstate New York. Additionally, she is a co-investigator on two HRSA grants focusing on 1) training clinical psychology interns to use evidence-based treatment and telehealth technology to treat substance use disorders in Monroe County and 2) deploying telehealth and evidence-based digital therapies to rural counties in NY and NH to decrease substance use.
Dr. Cassandra Berbary
Research Faculty
Behavioral Health
College of Health Sciences and Technology