Wesley R. Browning, PhD, is an Assistant Professor with a background in lifespan developmental psychology and gerontology at the UTHealth Houston Cizik School of Nursing. Dr. Browning’s research advances resilience among caregiving families, with a focus on developing and testing interventions to improve behavioral health outcomes for family caregivers. His scholarship examines how family systems, including sibling relationships, adult children, and extended kin, shape caregiver well-being and risk for adverse outcomes such as suicidal ideation and elder mistreatment. Using innovative methodologies, including daily diary designs and family-level recruitment strategies, he investigates how caregiving experiences and familial risk processes fluctuate over time within caregiving families.

Dr. Browning’s is Principal Investigator of MIT-CARE, an NIH Stage II clinical trial funded by the Roybal Center for Elder Mistreatment. This study will test an online, application-delivered mentalizing intervention designed to improve caregivers’ mental health, emotion processing, and caregiving behaviors. Dr. Browning’s other work, supported by the Speros Martel Endowment for the Aging, recruits sibling pairs of family caregivers to examine shared and divergent caregiving experiences within families. This research seeks to clarify how conflict, cohesion, and relationship dynamics within caregiving networks contribute to vulnerability or resilience to adverse behavioral health outcomes

Across his research portfolio, Dr. Browning is committed to resilience-focused, translational science that can be implemented in real-world caregiving contexts to strengthen support systems for families affected by dementia.