Biography
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 attend to process and context—especially in the area of interpersonal violence prevention and response. 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 main interests:
- trauma-informed care for youth with attention to setting/context
- systems change initiatives including organizational policy/practice reform and 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 work include integrating research and practice, which is best done in 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.
As an educator, I am especially passionate about our department’s service-learning course, 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 with a local sexual health education team.
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.
Education
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, M.S. in Psychology
Wellesley College, B.A. in Psychology
Awards and Honors
P.E.O. Scholar Award (for excellence in research and academic service/leadership, 2025)
Rappaport-Lo Award (for contributions to research, scholarship, teaching, and/or intervention for the benefit of people of color, 2025)
Frederick & Ruby Kanfer Achievement Award (for excellence in research and scholarship aimed at improving psychological lives, 2025)
Teachers ranked as excellent (fall 2023, spring 2024)
Herman Eisen Award (recognizing professional contributions to psychology; “reflecting a commitment to mental health needs in Champaign-Urbana,” 2023)
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Impact Award (spring 2021; shared with Brett Bergmann & Maya Marder)
Child Maltreatment and Interpersonal Violence Special Interest Group (Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies) Poster Award (2020)
Women Organized Against Rape Volunteer of the Year (2018)
Student Mental Health Advocate of the Year Award (Jordan Porco Foundation, 2017)
Courses Taught
This fall/spring, I am thrilled to be teaching our service learning course, in partnership with Cunningham Children's Home.
I recommend checking out Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP). In the past, I have been a mentor in this program. http://undergradresearch.illinois.edu/programs/urap.html.
External Links
Highlighted Publications
Check out my Google Scholar for a complete list of publications.
Rieger, A., Watkins, C., & Garthe, R. C. (2024). Appreciating the complexity of local gender-based violence needs assessments: Some key considerations and tensions in context. Violence Against Women.
Rieger, A., Zhan, Q., Griffin, B., Garthe, R. C., & Allen, N. E. (2024). Perils and possibilities: Sexual violence preventionists’ perspectives on gathering community input on prevention practice. Violence Against Women.
Rieger, A., Campbell, J., & Garthe, R. C. (2024). Connecting to community: Violence prevention barriers, geography, and preventionist perceptions of community leadership and opportunities. Health Promotion Practice.
Rieger, A., Blackburn, A. M., Nag, A., Holland, H., & Allen, N. E. (2023). Contradictions in change: Ecological factors in the implementation of outer layer sexual violence prevention. American Journal of Community Psychology.
Garthe, R. C., Rieger, A., Goffnet, J., Kaur, A., Sarol, J. N., Blackburn, A. M., Kim, S., Hereth, J., & Kennedy, A. C. (2022). Grade-level differences of peer and dating victimization among transgender, gender expansive, female, and male adolescents. Journal of LGBTQ Youth.
Nnawulezi, N., Rieger, A., Shaw, J., Greeson, M., Lichty, L., & Allen, N. E. (2022). Reflecting and rejuvenating our work, together: One team’s consideration of AJCP publications on gender-based violence. American Journal of Community Psychology 70(3-4), 255-264.
Rieger, A., Blackburn, A. M., Bystrynski, J. B., Garthe, R. C., & Allen, N. E. (2021). The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender-based violence in the United States: Framework and policy recommendations. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy.