Diondra Straiton, PhD is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow working with David Mandell, ScD, and Melanie Pellecchia, PhD, BCBA. She is passionate about leveraging implementation science to improve community-based autism services by optimizing training for clinicians working in under-resourced settings. Most of her work focuses on caregiver coaching interventions and naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBIs), a class of autism interventions that have the potential to be more neurodiversity-affirming.
As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Straiton is conducting research on optimizing group consultation for clinicians in an urban community mental health system by enhancing immediate performance feedback provided during group consultation. She has clinical expertise in working with neurodivergent and typically developing youth in under-resourced settings, including implementing caregiver-mediated NDBIs, cognitive-behavioral therapy, exposure therapy, and evidence-based practices in classroom settings. Dr. Straiton has trained more than 100 clinicians in a variety of publicly funded behavioral health settings in the United States, Canada, and China. She holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Michigan State University and completed her predoctoral internship in Clinical Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Psychiatry.
