Sarah Woods, Ph.D., LMFT-Supervisor
Director, Families and Health Lab
Sarah Woods, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and the Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at UT Southwestern. Dr. Woods is a family therapist whose research focuses on explaining how family relationships influence physical health, with a particular emphasis on psychophysiological mechanisms linking family relationship quality to adult health outcomes. The ultimate aim of this research is to inform family-based interventions for use in primary care, especially for patient populations at greatest risk of health disparities. Her recent research, supported by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, examines the development and use of a culturally-responsive, community-based dyadic hypertension self-management intervention for African Americans with uncontrolled hypertension in primary care, and is in partnership with, in part, physician faculty at UTSW in family medicine and internal medicine. In addition, her ongoing research supported by the National Institute on Aging (via the NIH Heal Initiative) examines how family relationships affect pain outcomes for aging African Americans via biobehavioral reactivity (i.e., psychophysiological reactions to stress) and in the context of structural inequities including discrimination and neighborhood-level disadvantage. This work is in partnership with family and pain scientists at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, University of Florida, and University at Buffalo.
Dr. Woods is formerly the Director of Behavioral Health in Family and Community Medicine, and actively involved in the behavioral health training of family medicine residents at UTSW, as well as the supervision and training of medical family therapy interns in the department. She is a Clinical Fellow of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, and an AAMFT Approved Supervisor. Dr. Woods serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy and the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, and serves as an Advisory Editor for Family Process.
Education:
- University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry (2007), Marriage and Family Therapy
- Florida State University (2012), Marriage and Family Therapy
Research Interests:
- Families and health
- Family-based interventions for primary care
- Integrated behavioral healthcare
- Psychophysiological stress mechanisms linking relationships and health