Dr. Erin Reilly is a clinical psychologist and researcher whose work focuses on why some people develop and stay stuck in eating disorders, and why existing treatments don’t work for everyone. Over more than a decade of research, she has developed a research program built around three connected questions: what makes someone vulnerable to an eating disorder in the first place, why behavioral treatments succeed for some patients and not others, and how better measurement and statistical practice can move the whole field forward.
Her current work, supported by a K23 Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (K23MH131874), uses neurocognitive testing and computational modeling to ask whether individual differences in reversal learning — how flexibly someone updates their expectations when circumstances change — help explain who responds to Family-Based Treatment, the leading treatment for adolescent anorexia nervosa. This builds on her broader interest in the overlap between eating disorders and anxiety-related processes, including responses to uncertainty, rumination, and perfectionism, and on a research thread examining how learning and decision-making processes shape treatment response and relapse risk more broadly.
Dr. Reilly earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Diego before joining the faculty at Hofstra University and later the University of California, San Francisco, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, where she continues to hold a affiliation. She joins the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University to establish the READ Lab.
Alongside her research, Dr. Reilly has taught and mentored extensively and has supervised more than 35 undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. She has served in leadership roles for the Academy for Eating Disorders and the Coalition for the Advancement and Application of Psychological Science, with a sustained focus on improving inclusiveness in eating disorder research and clinical training.