Dr Carla Smyth
Research Fellow & Clinical Liaison | Clinical Psychologist
BA (Hons), PhD (Clin), MAPS, FCCLP
Dr Carla Smyth is a practising clinical psychologist with a background in community mental health and private practice. She is passionate about integrating evidence-based tools into clinical practice and is a strong advocate for routine outcome monitoring. In her dual role as a clinician and researcher, Carla connects the worlds of frontline practice, psychometric assessment and AI prompt engineering. Her hands-on experience with clients informs her contributions to NovoPsych, ensuring that its tools are both practical and impactful, to ease the pressures on clinicians while enhancing therapeutic outcomes.
Areas of expertise
Psychometric scale development and validation, particularly schema-based assessment; routine outcome monitoring and measurement-based care; prompt engineering for AI-assisted clinical documentation; clinical psychology across community mental health, hospital and private practice settings; and evidence-based individual and group therapy, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) and mindfulness-based approaches.
A selection of articles by Dr Carla Smyth
Upgrading NovoNote’s Note Quality: What to Expect
Webinar: Maladaptive Schema Scale: Advancements in Schema Questionnaires
Maladaptive Schemas – Which Schema Questionnaire Should I Use?
Professional registration & endorsement
Carla is a registered Psychologist with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), holding an area-of-practice endorsement as a Clinical Psychologist. She is a member of the Australian Psychological Society (MAPS) and Fellow of the APS College of Clinical Psychologists (FCCLP), and was previously affiliated with the Health and Care Professions Council in the United Kingdom.
Clinical experience
Carla’s clinical experience spans community mental health, hospital and private practice settings in Australia and abroad. She has provided individual therapy to adults presenting with a broad range of mental health concerns, and has developed and delivered group therapy programs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she worked within the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom, providing psychological treatment to adults experiencing a range of mental health difficulties. She is currently practising as a clinical psychologist in private practice in Melbourne, Australia, where she provides individual therapy to adults.
Research
Carla’s research contributions include co-authoring the development and validation of the Maladaptive Schema Scale (MSS), NovoPsych’s schema-focused assessment tool. Earlier in her career, prior to her clinical training, she researched the neurophysiology of motor learning, publishing on primary motor cortex (M1) excitability. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), her research examined changes in brain plasticity during motor skill acquisition and retention, contributing to the understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying motor learning.
Psychological assessments developed
Co-author of the Maladaptive Schema Scale (MSS), a 108-item measure of 27 maladaptive schemas used in schema-focused case formulation.
Selected peer-reviewed publications
- Buchanan, B., Bartholomew, E., Smyth, C., & Hegarty, D. (2025). The Maladaptive Schema Scale (MSS): Development and Validation of a Comprehensive Questionnaire for Beliefs Related to Psychopathology. Assessment. doi:10.1177/10731911251390083
- Smyth, C., Summers, J. J., & Garry, M. I. (2010). Differences in motor learning success are associated with differences in M1 excitability. Human Movement Science, 29(4), 618–630. doi:10.1016/j.humov.2010.02.006
Conference presentations, webinars & public scholarship
Carla has delivered a widely viewed NovoPsych professional development webinar, Maladaptive Schema Scale: Advancements in Schema Questionnaires. She has also presented a poster, Motor task complexity and its relationship to motor learning and cortical excitability, at the Motor Control and Human Skills Conference, and presented her PhD and Honours research projects at the University of Tasmania, graduating with First Class Honours.
Awards & recognition
- Research Scholarship, University of Tasmania, for PhD studies
- Dean’s Roll of Excellence for outstanding academic achievements
- Golden Key International Honour Society
Contribution to NovoPsych
As Research Fellow and Clinical Liaison, Carla connects NovoPsych’s research and clinical-content work with the realities of frontline practice, helping ensure its tools remain both scientifically rigorous and practical for the clinicians who use them day to day. She also works on the prompt engineering behind NovoNote’s AI note-generation, designing and refining the prompts that shape its output and evaluating output quality to ensure notes are clinically accurate and useful.
“NovoPsych has transformed my own practice, allowing me to better understand and support my clients, as well as restore my work-life balance. I’m incredibly proud to contribute to NovoPsych’s mission, helping clinicians improve outcomes for their clients.”