Michaela M. Mozley, Ph.D.

 

Dr. Michaela Mozley is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist whose practice focuses on forensic assessment across juvenile, criminal, civil, and federal court contexts. She has evaluated children, adolescents, and adults in outpatient, inpatient, residential, and correctional settings, giving her unusually broad exposure to the populations and questions that arise in forensic referrals.
 

Her core specialization is sexual offending risk assessment to inform a wide range of legal questions, including pretrial decisions, sentencing, treatment needs, sex offender registry removal, record expungement, and SVP status. She selects from a full complement of validated, empirically based, population-appropriate instruments, matching the measure to the individual and the referral question rather than applying a single protocol uniformly. Her additional areas of focus include violence risk assessment and trauma assessment.

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Dr. Mozley most recently served as the Problematic Sexual Behavior Lead Psychologist at the Cook County Juvenile Court Clinic, affiliated with Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. In that role, she conducted psychosexual and other forensic evaluations involving youth and parents referred through the juvenile court system. She was also responsible for advancing the use of evidence-based practices in psychosexual evaluations at the clinic. Her responsibilities included shaping evaluation policy, identifying appropriate referrals and referral questions, supervising staff evaluators, and providing training to staff.  During her forensic postdoctoral fellowship with the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, she conducted SVP precommitment and annual review evaluations, as well as competency to stand trial, criminal responsibility, and capacity-to-conform evaluations for adults and juveniles.

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Her broader clinical background informs the depth of her forensic work. She has delivered trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy to children and adolescents, provided sexual offense-specific treatment in a state prison setting, counseled parents of trauma-exposed and justice-involved youth, and conducted individual, family, and group therapy with juvenile offenders and their families.
 

Beyond direct practice, Dr. Mozley has presented guest lectures, professional didactics, and conference papers for legal professionals, clinicians, and trainees on evidence-based trauma assessment and treatment; sexual offending risk assessment; landmark Sexually Violent Predator and Sexually Dangerous Persons cases; and the links among trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress, and juvenile offending. She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters focused on trauma assessment and the impact of trauma exposure on juvenile offending, and her doctoral training was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.