Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Megan Carlos

“One thing I emphasize with my PsyD students is what we need in the next generation of psychologists,” shared Dr. Megan Carlos, a Full-Time Institute Faculty member in the Wright Institute’s Clinical Psychology program. “I encourage them to seek out leadership positions, work to improve diversity training, and remind them that they’re needed in the field.”

Dr. Carlos’ path toward becoming a clinical psychologist began as an undergraduate. She attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where she earned her BA in Psychology in 1998. Dr. Carlos loved her time at Mills, where her psychology cohort was only thirty people. She enjoyed being a part of this close-knit community as a student and finds that she enjoys working closely with her students today as an instructor. It was during her time at Mills where Dr. Carlos first discovered her interest in teaching when she applied to be a teacher’s assistant during her sophomore year. “That was my first teaching experience,” she shared. “At the end of the term, my professor, who later became my mentor, told me that while she knew I wanted to be a clinician, I would make a great teacher.”

While studying at Mills College, Dr. Carlos also took a few classes at UC Berkeley. One day, she saw a flyer there recruiting counselors/research assistants for Dr. Stephen Hinshaw’s Social Development of Girls with ADHD Project. He was a prominent researcher in the field, so this was an excellent opportunity for an undergraduate student. “We were basically counselors for the camp while we collected data for his study,” Dr. Carlos explained. “I ended up working there for all three summers that he ran the girls camp.”

In 1999, Dr. Carlos enrolled at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In addition to being one of the top developmental psychology programs in the country, University of Minnesota was a great fit for Dr. Carlos because they had a joint developmental and clinical psychology program, allowing her to do developmental and attachment research while also pursuing a clinical path. “Being around a lot of really smart people who enjoyed talking about research was intellectually engaging and fun,” she reflected. Dr. Carlos earned her MA in child psychology in 2003 and her PhD in child clinical psychology in 2005.

During her graduate studies, Dr. Carlos was a research assistant for the Parent-Child Project at the University of Minnesota, a long-term longitudinal study. “They recruited 267 mothers who were pregnant with their first children from public health clinics in Minneapolis in 1975,” Dr. Carlos explained. “The initial plan was to follow those mothers for a few years and figure out if they could predict what led to child abuse.” The child participants from the study are now fifty years old and the study continues to follow their development, making it one of only a handful of studies around the world examining how early attachment and childhood circumstances predict who you become as an adult.

Dr. Carlos’s doctoral dissertation, titled “Continuity and Change in Attachment Classification Between Infancy, Late Adolescence, and Early Adulthood in a High-Risk Sample,” was inspired by her work with the Parent-Child Project. The project examined whether early attachment, measured during infancy, predicted quality of attachment in young adulthood. Dr. Carlos explained. “In the Minnesota sample, we found that there was not a significant correlation between the infancy attachment data and attachment classification at age twenty-six.” Essentially, her findings were that more life stress as a result of lower socioeconomic status in childhood predicted more changes in attachment over time.

Over the course of her doctoral studies, Dr. Carlos participated in multiple clinical practicum experiences. She worked in a day treatment program for preschoolers, providing play therapy with toddlers with a history of abuse. She also had the opportunity to conduct psychoeducational assessments for children and adolescents at an outpatient clinic, which was a great experience to prepare her for internship.

From 2004-2005, Dr. Carlos completed an internship in child psychology at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford and at the Children’s Health Council in Palo Alto, CA. “I spent six months in the Children’s Hospital at Stanford, where I worked in pediatric psychology and in an adolescent eating disorder inpatient program, and the next six months in a community mental health clinic in Palo Alto, where I did lots of therapy and assessment,” she shared. “I had a really good internship cohort - there were four of us and we were really supportive of one another.”

Despite her initial plans to primarily be a clinician, since completing her PhD, Dr. Carlos has held a variety of teaching positions at institutions in the Bay Area, teaching human development, assessment, sociocultural issues, research methods, and many other courses. She began her teaching career as a postdoctoral fellow in the school psychology program at University of the Pacific, then additional teaching opportunities kept arising. “I really love teaching human development and presenting the material in a way that’s clinically relevant to the students,” she explained. “I talk about how understanding where someone is developmentally furthers our knowledge of how we're going to work with them and understand them clinically.” Dr. Carlos also discovered over the years that she really enjoys teaching statistics courses despite not enjoying them as a student herself. “One of my favorite things is to teach statistics in a way that students don’t hate it,” she laughed.

In 2018, Dr. Carlos opened her own private practice in Berkeley, CA, providing therapy to children, adolescents, and adults. “I think one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about private practice is following clients over time, which is consistent with my interest in developmental change,” she shared. Although she began her practice with in-person sessions, she transitioned to fully remote during the pandemic and has continued to work remotely since then because of the increased flexibility it offers her.

From 2023-2025, Dr. Carlos was the Associate Program Director of the Clinical Psychology PsyD Program at Alliant International University. Her favorite aspect of that role was mentoring, supporting, and advocating for the students in the program. “I enjoy getting updates from previous students,” she reflected. “I get to hear about their marriages, babies, and private practices and it’s really fun to think about where they started and where they’ve ended up.”

In the spring of 2025, Dr. Carlos joined the Wright Institute's Clinical Psychology program as an adjunct faculty member, teaching two sections of Lifespan Development. She loved teaching the whole second-year cohort and getting to know all of the students. This term, Dr. Carlos took on the role of full-time institute faculty member and is teaching Case Conference I, Research Methods I, and Research Methods III. She is enjoying the small class sizes and in-depth relationships she’s building with her students.

Two of Dr. Carlos’s primary professional and research interests are working with individuals with disabilities and chronic illness in psychotherapy and training students with disabilities in professional psychology. “I have navigated my own development from a trainee to a professional as someone with a disability and I found that there was not always a good amount of support or mentoring for students with disabilities,” she explained. “I decided to use that experience to advocate for better support for trainees with disabilities.” Dr. Carlos has previously served on APA’s Committee for Disability Issues in Psychology, helping advocate for better psychological services for clients with disabilities and for more inclusive graduate programs for psychology trainees with disabilities.

Outside of her work as an instructor and clinician, Dr. Carlos is busy being a mom to two kids, ages nine and thirteen. In her limited free time, she enjoys going to the beach, hiking, and skiing in Tahoe in the winter. During the summers, when she has more time off, she enjoys traveling with her children, connecting with friends from her graduate program, and spending time outdoors.

Dr. Carlos hopes to continue teaching at the Wright Institute for the foreseeable future and really settle into the community. She’s excited to have landed at an institution that puts its focus on student outcomes and is eager to make a difference in the lives of her students. Dr. Carlos also enjoys being a part of what she considers to be a transformational experience for students. “You can’t come into a PsyD program like this expecting not to change or grow personally,” Dr. Carlos explained. “This training changes you as a whole person, so I tell students to be ready for that over the course of the time they are here.”