News

We are pleased to announce that Stephanie Stepp, PhD, has received conferral of tenure at the rank of professor by the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Stepp is an internationally recognized expert on the developmental psychopathology of borderline personality disorder. Her work includes the study of predictive models, illness progression, and effectiveness of psychosocial treatment. Among her contributions to the field, Dr. Stepp was one of the first to use ecological momentary activity to document, in real time, emotion dysregulation in the offspring of mothers with borderline personality disorder. She additionally identified physiological markers of emotion dysregulation in the offspring of mothers with borderline personality disorder. 

In addition, Dr. Stepp’s studies were among the first to demonstrate that the characteristics of borderline personality disorder are stable and detectable in children, challenging the prevailing notion that borderline personality disorder could occur only in adults. She identified factors involved in the familial transmission of borderline personality disorder from mother to daughter, and developed an intervention designed to attenuate this transmission by targeting aspects of the mother’s emotion regulation. Dr. Stepp has demonstrated that improvements in maternal emotion regulation (via random assignment to dialectical behavior therapy) predict improvements in offspring emotion regulation development and externalizing problems in young children. Her work has highlighted the importance of the parent-child context in the development of the disorder, which suggests that interventions that include the child’s family have great potential for effectiveness.

Dr. Stepp currently leads or collaborates on eight federally funded grants. She is principal investigator of a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) R01 assessing dialectical behavior therapy skills training to improve maternal emotion regulation, and testing a mechanistic model of suicide risk transmission from mothers to their children during a critical developmental juncture for the emergence of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Findings from the study will identify intergenerational mechanisms of suicide risk and provide an intervention and prevention model for mitigating suicide risk in mother-child dyads. In addition, she is contact PI of an NIMH R01 focused on measuring experiences like loneliness, low self-worth, and hopelessness in young Black children to determine whether risk for suicide can be captured in early childhood, and whether protective factors such as racial socialization and identity protect Black youth from developing suicidal thoughts.

Dr. Stepp’s research has yielded numerous original, peer-reviewed publications in prestigious journals. She has been invited to present her work at multiple universities and scientific organizations. For ten years, Dr. Stepp has served as associate chair of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Environmental Influences on Child Outcomes (ECHO) Publications Committee. She has reviewed grants for numerous National Institutes of Health (NIH) study sections, and for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), and contributed to the American Psychiatric Association (APA)’s refinement and development of diagnostic criteria for personality disorders for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) Steering Committee. Dr. Stepp is a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of the National Education Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder and of the AFSP, and is a board member and former president of the North American Society for the Study of Personality Disorders.

In addition to her research accomplishments, Dr. Stepp is an award-winning teacher and mentor. She has received the Department’s Clinical Supervision and Training Award for her work with the Clinical Psychology Internship Program, and was honored with the UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital Exemplary Teaching Service Award in Psychiatry Residency Training. She currently serves on the training faculty of three Department of Psychiatry NIH T32 programs: Clinical Research Training for Psychologists, Developmental Alcohol Research Training, and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Research.

“Dr. Stepp is an outstanding clinical investigator and scholar with national and international recognition. Her research program reflects her commitment to integrating clinical knowledge and basic science to aid in the prevention, early identification, and treatment of borderline personality disorder. Dr. Stepp is additionally a highly accomplished teacher and mentor, and a superb citizen of the scientific community,” said David Lewis, MD (Chair, Department of Psychiatry).

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Stepp!