YA Cares

Kelsey Bacharz is a doctoral candidate in the Clinical and Health Psychology program at the University of Florida. She is currently completing her final year of training at the Department of Veteran Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System as a clinical psychology resident. Kelsey’s clinical and research interests broadly focus on understanding and improving psychosocial outcomes for those affected by cancer. More specifically, Kelsey’s research uses a developmental lens to explore the unique impacts of being a young adult cancer caregiver. Her overall career goal is to develop evidence-based clinical interventions to support this underserved population. 

Kelsey recently defended her dissertation, which was a longitudinal, multi-method study that aimed to understand the experiences of caregivers for individuals diagnosed with a primary brain tumor. The study involved routine administration of caregiver quality of life assessments as well as semi-structured interviews with a subset of young adult caregivers to elucidate their experience and needs that could be addressed in future intervention research.