Averi N. Gaines, MS

Education and Training

MS, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2022

BA, Haverford College, 2017

Biographical Sketch

Averi Gaines is a seventh-year graduate student in clinical psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is currently completing her predoctoral clinical internship at the Charleston Consortium in Charleston, SC. In 2017, Averi graduated with honors from Haverford College with a BA in Psychology. After graduating, Averi worked as a Clinical Research Coordinator in the Center for Psychotherapy Research at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. She began her graduate work at UMass in 2019, and she was awarded a Graduate Fellowship during her first year. Her research centers broadly on psychotherapy process, outcome, and implementation, with the aims of optimizing mental health care effectiveness and equity via two primary empirical threads: (1) investigating theory-common patient and dyadic characteristics (i.e., traits) and longitudinal processes (i.e., states) that influence treatment outcomes, and (2) uncovering varied therapist effectiveness differences to inform personalized, data-driven treatment decision-making. Her master's thesis examined the association between patient-therapist convergence in treatment outcome expectation and patients’ posttreatment symptoms/functioning. Her dissertation uses machine learning methods to classify therapists’ sexual orientation-specific effectiveness and test whether patient-therapist matching on this dimension can improve treatment outcomes for sexual minority individuals. Her work has been disseminated widely at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.  

Research Interests

Psychotherapy process, outcome, and implementation; therapist effects; mental health care disparities; measurement-based care; patient-centered research; psychotherapy integration; common treatment factors; mediators and moderators of treatment effects; patient-therapist attunement; consensus in psychotherapy science