Agnes (Aggie) Rieger

Hi! I’m a PhD student in Clinical-Community Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My pronouns are she/her/hers.

I'm excited about research and practice that attends to process and context, especially interpersonal violence prevention and response work. I'm passionate about supporting providers as they pursue community engagement and systems change, and expanding research to better understand these areas. My scholarship has three arms: 

• trauma-informed care for youth with attention to setting/context
• systems change initiatives including training providers to use reflexive and systems thinking tools
• interpersonal violence prevention that seeks to change the context in which violence occurs 

Highlights of my research to date include working on incredible teams. I've gotten to be part of evaluating sexual violence prevention efforts across Illinois with the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Illinois Department of Public Health; consulting/serving as the primary evaluator for a domestic violence shelter to support community-engaged public housing interpersonal violence prevention; and co-designing/facilitating Illinois’s Moving Prevention Forward project, which developed recommendations for the state coalition’s future sexual violence primary prevention efforts. My dissertation explores the intersection of adolescent identity and rurality for interpersonal violence exposure, and how we can reground school trauma-informed care practices for rural communities.

My applied work inspires my research, and vice versa. In the clinic, I especially enjoy working with youth who have been exposed to violence, healthy relationships/social-sexual health education (centering neurodiverse youth), and prevention/education interventions with couples. I was one small part of helping support our campus’s COVID-19 response by working on a team to develop an integrative resource document, am endlessly inspired by my rape crisis volunteer experiences, and led a team of mental health educators as an undergraduate. This year, my practicum training is at Rape Advocacy, Counseling, and Education Services (RACES), where I am providing child and adult trauma treatment, designing a youth group that connects CBT principles with community activism/organizing principles, and offering staff trainings on crisis response and neuroaffirming approaches.

As an educator, I am especially passionate about our department’s service-learning course for undergraduates, which partners with a local residential treatment center for youth, and our science communication workshop series for masters students. I also coordinate our program area’s community psychology/clinical-community psychology interest group and volunteer as part of a sexual health education team in town.

When I’m not researching, providing evidence-based treatment, or teaching, you can probably find me running to a good audiobook for book club; I've run two marathons and am optimistically scouting out my third. This summer, I'll start my predoctoral internship at the Charleston Consortium (Medical University of South Carolina), on the child track.