Carla Sharp
Carla Sharp, Ph.D., is the John and Rebecca Moores Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at CLASS. She is also Director of the Center for Adolescent Prevention, Treatment, and Diagnostic Assessment and the Developmental Psychopathology Laboratory at UH. She holds adjunct appointments at the University of Texas, Baylor College of Medicine, University College London, and the University of the Free State in South Africa. She has a longstanding interest in social cognition (mentalizing) as a cause and correlate of psychiatric disorder across the lifespan, with a special focus on youth. She has published over 300 peer-reviewed publications, numerous chapters, and eight books. A large proportion of her research utilizes Borderline Personality Disorder (and other personality disorders) to study where social-cognitive function fails. As such, she has significantly advanced the scientific understanding of the phenomenology, causes, and correlates of personality pathology in youth.
She received the 2016 Mid-Career Award from the North American Society for the Study of Personality Disorders and the 2018 Achievement in the Field of Severe Personality Disorders Award from the New York Personality Disorders Institute. She is currently an Associate Editor of the APA journal Personality Disorders: Theory, Research and Treatment and a member of the task force for updating the American Psychiatric Association’s practice guidelines for BPD. Recent advances in her work reflect a translational approach to continue the earlier focus on mentalization to assess its role as a mechanism of change in personality pathology, as well as in other attachment-related disorders, and an interest in the DSM-5 alternative model of personality disorder. Her work has been funded by the NICHD, NIAAA, NIMH, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and other foundations.