Dr. Hangen is a doctoral-level board certified behavior analyst with over 10 years of experience serving individuals with various intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families.
She began her career at the Neurobehavioral Unit inpatient program at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, focusing on assessing and treating severe challenging behavior. This experience gave her a strong foundation for understanding and treating behavioral challenges. She also has experience providing early intervention services to young children diagnosed with various disabilities, assessing and treating challenging behavior in outpatient settings, and providing supervision to aspiring behavior analysts.
Her areas of expertise include early intervention and using a compassionate framework to assess and treat severe problem behavior. Her current research interests focus on assessing and treating severe problem behavior, identifying the mechanism(s) of token reinforcement, and evaluating the efficacy of preferred versus neutral tokens during reinforcement schedule thinning. Dr. Hangen has had her research on these topics published in peer-reviewed journals and has given numerous professional presentations at national and state conferences. She is currently in the process of co-authoring a book chapter on challenging behavior exhibited by individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Dr. Hangen teaches graduate courses for the applied behavior analysis master’s program. Her aim is to prepare future practitioners to provide culturally responsive and compassionate services to promote meaningful and lasting behavior change.
