About

R. Douglas Wright is a faculty member at the Northwestern Bienen School of Music, serving as a Lecturer in Trombone. He holds a Master of Music degree from Boston University and trained at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Norman Bolter. Wright has an extensive performance background, having been the principal trombone of the Minnesota Orchestra since 1995, and has performed as a soloist in works such as Kalevi Aho’s Symphony No. 9 for Trombone and Orchestra. He has also given world premiere performances, including Kurt Schwertsik’s Trombone Concerto written for him, and has performed various trombone concertos with the Minnesota Orchestra. Additionally, Wright has served as a member of the Empire Brass Quintet, and held positions such as principal trombone of the Cleveland Orchestra, assistant principal trombone of the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, second trombone of the Boston Pops Orchestra, and principal trombone of the Rhode Island Philharmonic. He is an active chamber musician, frequently performing in Sommerfest chamber concerts and solo recitals. Wright has also served as an adjunct professor of trombone at Boston University and is a committed educator and Selmer clinician, giving recitals and master classes across the United States and internationally. His work is featured on recordings with the Minnesota Orchestra, Boston Pops, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Empire Brass.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Communication
• Developmental psychology
• Materials science
• Optoelectronics
• Psychiatry
• Data science
• Applied psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Nanotechnology
• Composite material
• Chemical engineering
• Biology
• Geography

Selected publications

• A brief international screening tool for traumatic birth and childbirth-related PTSD: the city BiTS-short form

  BMJ Global Health · 2025-08-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  INTRODUCTION: Screening to identify traumatic births and childbirth-related post-traumatic stress disorder (CB-PTSD) is critical for reducing the global burden of maternal mental health challenges. Despite this, no brief, validated tools exist for international use. This study therefore developed and validated a short version of the City Birth Trauma Scale (City BiTS) to provide a brief, globally relevant screening tool. METHODS: The City BiTS-Short was developed in three stages. In stage 1, exclusive lasso statistical analyses were conducted on survey data of 11 302 postpartum women in 31 countries to identify the most effective items for the City BiTS-Short, ensuring all four CB-PTSD symptom domains were represented. In stage 2, stakeholder reviews were conducted with researchers, health professionals (midwives, health visitors, psychiatrist, psychologist) and representatives of women who experienced traumatic birth. In stage 3, the City BiTS-Short was finalised and psychometric properties examined across diverse geographical settings. RESULTS: The City BiTS-Short comprises one item assessing traumatic birth and four items assessing CB-PTSD symptoms: re-experiencing, avoidance, negative cognitions and mood and hyperarousal. The scale had strong psychometric properties, including good internal consistency (α=0.78) and high correlations with the original City BiTS (r=0.90), birth trauma ratings (r=0.50), distress (r=0.56), impairment (r=0.47) and CB-PTSD diagnoses (r=0.54). It identified 90% of participants with a CB-PTSD diagnosis. Women who had operative births (F(3,2174)=127.38, p<0.001), maternal complications (F(2,2163)=212.84, p<0.001), infant complications (F(2,1100)=138.93, p<0.001) or depression (t(3209.5)=-30.96, p<0.001) had higher scores. Psychometric properties were consistent across most international contexts, with stakeholders affirming its utility. CONCLUSION: The City BiTS-Short offers a brief, validated screening tool for identifying birth trauma and CB-PTSD symptoms. Its widespread adoption can enhance early detection and support for women, potentially reducing the global burden of birth trauma and improving maternal mental health outcomes worldwide. Further research is needed to explore its use in specific contexts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A multi-scale assessment for managing coastal geomorphic changes in southwestern Lake Michigan, Great Lakes

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• A process-informed framework linking temperature-rainfall projections and urban flood modeling

  2025-09-10

  articleOpen access

  Abstract. Predicting changes in urban pluvial flood hazards under climate warming is crucial for risk mitigation and disaster management. A key challenge in simulating future urban flood hazards is the scarcity of high-resolution rainfall projections, particularly at the sub-daily and kilometer scales required for hydrodynamic modeling. We present a cascading process-informed framework that requires minimal observed climatic data, enabling scenario analysis even in data-scarce cities. This framework consists of a distribution‐based spatial quantile mapping (DSQM) method to morph observed rainfall fields conditioned on temperature changes, a stochastic storm transposition (SST) method to account for the spatial variability of urban rainfall, and a rain‐on‐grid hydrodynamic model (AUTOSHED) for efficient simulation of urban pluvial floods at high spatio-temporal resolution. The framework allows the generation of stochastic rainfall fields under different rainfall return levels and regional warming levels. It supports the quantification of changes in future urban flood statistics with detailed hazard maps of inundation depth, duration, and flow velocity. We select the metropolitan area of Beijing (300 km2) as a case study and utilize gridded hourly and 1 km rainfall data to simulate flood evolution at 5 min and 5 m resolution under regional warming levels of 1 °C, 3 °C, and 5 °C relative to the period 1998–2019. Our results show that with rising temperatures, regional storms tend to become more intense but smaller in spatial extent, which may in turn drive increased flood depth, accelerated flow velocity, and deeper inundation, collectively elevating pluvial flood risk. Specifically, mean rainfall intensity increases by 6 %, 11 %, and 20 % (respectively with the warming levels), peak flood depth exhibits a nonlinear increase of 4 %, 7 %, and 8 %, due to the complex interactions of reduced storm area, increased storm intensities, and rainfall spatial variability. The proposed DSQM–SST–AUTOSHED framework offers a data-driven, physically grounded approach to assess urban flood risk under regional warming, and only requires observed rainfall fields and reanalysis temperature datasets, readily accessible from public sources, making the approach easily extendable to other cities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Supplementary material to "A process-informed framework linking temperature-rainfall projections and urban flood modeling"

  2025-09-10

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Psychometric evaluation of the Trust in Science and Scientists Scale"

  2024-03-08

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Psychometric evaluation of the Trust in Science and Scientists Scale

  Royal Society Open Science · 2024 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Data science

  Reliable and valid measurement of trust in science and scientists is important. Assessing levels of such trust is important in determining attitudes and predicting behaviours in response to medical and scientific interventions targeted at managing public crises. However, trust is a complex phenomenon that has to be understood in relation to both distrust and mistrust. The Trust in Science and Scientists Scale has been adopted with increasing frequency in large-scale public health research. Detailed psychometric evaluation of the scale is overdue and makes meaningful comparisons between studies that use the scale difficult. Here, we examine the scale's dimensionality across five separate samples. We find that two factors emerge that are divided by their item polarity. Implications for scale use and trust in science measurement are discussed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evaluating SWMM Modeling Performance for Rapid Flows on Tunnels with Geometric Discontinuities

  Journal of Hydraulic Engineering · 2024-09-28 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  The EPA’s Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) has been applied across the globe for citywide stormwater modeling due to its robustness and versatility. Recent research indicated that SWMM, with proper setup, can be applied in the description of more dynamic flow conditions, such as rapid inflow conditions. However, stormwater systems often have geometric discontinuities that can pose challenges to SWMM model accuracy, and this issue is poorly explored in the current literature. The present work evaluates the performance of SWMM 5 in the context of a real-world stormwater tunnel with a geometric discontinuity. Various combinations of spatiotemporal discretization are systematically evaluated along with four pressurization algorithms, and results are benchmarked with another hydraulic model using tunnel inflow simulations. Results indicated that the pressurization algorithm has an important effect on SWMM’s accuracy in conditions of sudden diameter changes. From the tested pressurization algorithms, the original Preissmann slot algorithm was the option that yielded more representative results for a wider range of spatiotemporal discretizations. Regarding spatiotemporal discretization options, intermediate discretization, and time steps that lead to Courant numbers equal to one performed best. Interestingly, the traditional SWMM’s link-node approach also presented numerical instabilities despite having low continuity errors. Results indicated that although SWMM can be effective in simulating rapid inflow conditions in tunnels, situations with drastic geometric changes need to be carefully evaluated so that modeling results are representative.

  PublisherDOI

• Estimating Percentages and Free Recall of Categorized Lists in Education Related Tasks

  2024-05-31

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  When learning new information, how this information fits within categories affects estimates of how often members of these categories have been presented and memory for these items. Two studies are proposed to examine how the similarity of non-target items and the proportion of target versus non-target items affect estimates of frequency and memory recall. These studies, which are conducted within an educational context, build on research by Bordalo et al. (2022).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How is the memory conformity effect influenced by the relative power of the individuals involved?

  Applied Cognitive Psychology · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  • Cognitive psychology

  Abstract When people remember together, what one person says can affect what others report. The size of this effect is dependent on characteristics of the people and how they express their beliefs. The power relationship among people affects much of their social cognition, including the size of this memory conformity effect. However, some research has shown people conform more to high power individuals and some research shows the opposite. The proposed research identified what we believe is an important difference in these studies in the type of power that was manipulated: evaluation versus managerial power. The proposed research will examine these using a 2 × 2 factorial design, plus a control group. The study is designed to be like how people learn new vocabulary in an education context.

  PublisherDOI

• Author response for "Psychometric evaluation of the Trust in Science and Scientists Scale"

  2024-02-05

  peer-reviewSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nathan C. Gianneschi

  Northwestern University

  28 shared

• Rachel K. O’Reilly

  University of Birmingham

  22 shared

• Mollie A. Touve

  Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University

  20 shared

• Joseph P. Patterson

  University of California System

  14 shared

• Olivier Colombani

  Le Mans Université

  10 shared

• Christophe Chassenieux

  Le Mans Université

  10 shared

• Kay E. B. Doncom

  University of Warwick

  8 shared

• Anaïs Pitto‐Barry

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  8 shared

Labs

• Wright LabPI

Education

• Other, Trombone

  Boston University

• Other, Trombone

  New England Conservatory of Music