Amanda Balkhi

A pediatric clinical psychologist by training, I am currently Executive Director of the Balkhi Foundation, a scholarship granting organization that seeks to help level the playing field for hard working students facing financial obstacles to education. Above all, I'm a believer that big concepts can be distilled and implemented to make incremental change. At the Foundation this means taking best practices for bias reduction and equitable access and distilling them into an application students can complete in less than 15 minutes before proceeding to a blinded selection process. In the realm of psychology, this means taking the heart of evidenced based exposure therapy with response prevention for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and distilling it into the first book for young children that uses a diverse cast of children engaging in evidence-based response prevention techniques - One, Two, What Do I Do? A Children's Guide to Talking Back to OCD's Intrusive Thoughts. In my volunteer work, this means partnering with fellow alumni to give back to my alma mater through bite sized and accessible mentorship resources for undergraduates.

Education Access and Evolution, Evidenced Based Interventions, Dissemination (i.e. How to Get Big Ideas to the People Who They Impact Most)

Small actions can have an iterative impact.