C. Missy Moore

C. Missy Moore, Ph.D., NCC is an Associate Professor in the Department of Counseling and Human Development Services at the University of Georgia, where she teaches graduate courses in quantitative methodology, research methods, assessment, and program evaluation at the master’s and doctoral levels. A clinical mental health counselor by training, she has experience serving children and adults across school-based, employment/EAP, and outpatient settings, grounding her teaching and research in real-world practice. Her scholarship is organized around two primary areas of specialization: (1) applied measurement and evaluation in counseling and (2) occupational health and stress processes, with an emphasis on how these areas shape the quality of research and the realities of counseling practice.

In her first area, Dr. Moore advances measurement and evaluation practices in counseling, with an emphasis on strengthening how research is conducted and how findings are translated into practice. She focuses on the development and use of psychometrically sound assessments and systematic evaluation processes to improve the precision, validity, and real-world relevance of counseling research. Her work emphasizes applied measurement as a foundation for enhancing inference, informing clinical decision making, and strengthening counseling training, practice, and supervision.

A second line of her research examines occupational health, with a focus on work-related stress, burnout, and the ways workplace demands shape intrapersonal, interpersonal, and professional functioning. Her work extends beyond individual outcomes to examine how stress operates across systems, creating spillover effects into relational contexts. She is particularly interested in regulatory processes within the counseling dyad, including how stress influences clients’ and counselors’ capacity for emotional regulation, engagement, and meaning-making in session. In this way, she investigates how occupational and regulatory stress shape therapeutic alliance, supervision relationships, family systems, and broader interpersonal functioning, positioning relational processes as a central pathway through which stress shapes both client outcomes and the long-term sustainability of counselors’ work.

Dr. Moore uses her expertise in measurement and evaluation to support community-based work through program evaluation and to strengthen the broader counseling research landscape. Through her evaluation work, she partners with organizations to design and implement practical, data-informed systems that support accountability, continuous improvement, and real-world decision making. She also applies this expertise in her role as a Quantitative Associate Editor for the Journal of Counseling & Development, the flagship journal of the American Counseling Association, where she supports the development of rigorous, high-quality quantitative research in counseling.

Her work has received national recognition through multiple awards, including the ACES Research in Counselor Education and Supervision Award, the AARC Exemplary Assessment and Evaluation Practices Award, the ACES Outstanding Dissertation Award, and the ASERVIC Biggs-Pine Journal Award.