Katherine Venturo-Conerly, M.A.

Katherine Venturo-Conerly graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College in 2020 and is now a fourth-year doctoral student at the Harvard Laboratory for Youth Mental Health. She is also the co-founder and scientific director of the Shamiri Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to developing, testing, and disseminating scalable mental health programs for youth in Kenya.

Venturo-Conerly’s professional aims are twofold: 1) to conduct community-based research on psychotherapies for children and adolescents to improve the quality and accessibility of care, and 2) to deliver at scale evidence-based, yet flexible, youth clinical care in community settings. To this end, much of her research involves studying the effectiveness of treatment elements in the United States and Kenya using multiple methods. 

She is currently funded by a National Institute of Mental Health National Research Service Award to study decision-making about treatment elements in modular youth psychotherapies such as MATCH. She is also studying the effectiveness of individual treatment elements in the Shamiri Wellness Intervention in a randomized controlled trial, working to design novel interventions and delivery systems for Kenyan high schools, and studying the effects of individual treatment principles using ecological momentary assessment. Finally, she is interested in evidence synthesis (e.g., meta-analysis) as a means of improving youth psychotherapies.