Rate My Professor Matt Gallagher

Matthew W. Gallagher, Ph.D., serves as Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston and is affiliated with the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics. He obtained his Ph.D. in clinical and quantitative psychology with honors from the University of Kansas in 2011. Subsequently, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University. Before his current role, Dr. Gallagher worked as a staff psychologist in the Behavioral Science Division of the National Center for PTSD and as Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine. A licensed clinical psychologist, he contributes to graduate student training and reviews applications for the clinical psychology program.

Dr. Gallagher's research specializations encompass the evaluation of transdiagnostic treatments like the Unified Protocol for emotional disorders, particularly for PTSD and anxiety disorders; the identification of mechanisms of change in empirically supported therapies; and the investigation of how positive expectancies—such as hope, optimism, and self-efficacy—foster well-being and resilience to psychopathology. Additional interests include the causes and components of positive mental health, its relation to mental illness, advanced measurement techniques, methodology, meta-analysis, and modeling longitudinal change. His research has received funding from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology, and Department of Defense. With over 115 publications, key works include the development and validation of the PCL-5, the Unified Protocol randomized trial, the hierarchical structure of well-being, and meta-analyses on perceived control and positive expectancies. He earned the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science in 2016. Dr. Gallagher teaches clinical research methods, meta-analysis, structural equation modeling, anxiety disorders, positive psychology, and abnormal psychology.