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Kathryn Coniglio, First Recipient of the G. Terence Wilson Award

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Kathryn Coniglio is the winner of the first annual G. Terence Wilson Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award.

The G. Terence Wilson Award was created to honor the lifetime contributions of retired faculty member Terry Wilson, who spent a lifetime leading the development of the field of clinical psychology and both directing and participating in the Rutgers Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program. Throughout his career, Terry was always on the leading edge of clinical research and practice implementation, and thus the Wilson Award aims to identify student projects that are both innovative and exemplify a high degree of scientific rigor. These descriptors certainly apply to Kathryn's work!

Kathryn is currently a psychology intern at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Psychiatry. Her project was titled, "What do women with eating disorders think about while they exercise? An investigation using ecological momentary assessment." which seeks to understand cognitions present in real-time during exercise in women with eating disorders. Preliminary findings show that actively thinking during exercise about weight loss predicts engagement in eating disorder behaviors later that same day and that certain types of exercise (i.e., yoga) were significantly less associated with thoughts about weight loss than other types of exercise. Clinically, findings help point to the utility of using cognitive interventions to shape exercise behavior among those in eating disorder recovery who seek to re-engage with exercise in a more adaptive, functional way that does not lead to eating disorder relapse.