Cara Tomaso

Cara Tomaso, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor and licensed clinical psychologist specializing in pediatric psychology at Yale School of Medicine. Her practice is embedded within the Section of Pediatric Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation at Yale New Haven Hospital, where she contributes to the Yale Limb Restoration and Lengthening Program and the Female+ Athlete Program. She provides behavioral health consultation to multidisciplinary teams and direct interventions for youth and families navigating chronic/acute health conditions, surgical readiness, and behavioral pain management. Dr. Tomaso’s education includes a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2023) and postdoctoral training at the Yale Child Study Center (2024). Her research focuses on the interplay between executive control, mental health, sleep, and obesity-related outcomes across developmental stages.

Her work integrates longitudinal studies on childhood executive function’s role in BMI trajectories, pandemic-related psychopathology buffering, and neurobiological mechanisms of obesity. She has published extensively on adolescent health behaviors, sleep’s impact on mood/emotion regulation, and culturally informed approaches to stress resilience in college students. Dr. Tomaso’s clinical and research expertise bridges behavioral medicine, developmental psychology, and pediatric healthcare systems.