Worksite Spotlight: Providing Health and Stress Management Services at The Purpose Center

Hello everyone! My name is Richie Gray, and I am the Gil Internship Manager for the Spring 2026 Gil cohort. I had the pleasure of visiting The Purpose Center (formerly known as KKJ Forensic and Psychological Services) recently during the Spring 2026 semester. This was a unique experience as this was the Gil Internship’s first virtual site visit! The Purpose Center is a multi-speciality, small private clinic in Durham, North Carolina, that provides empirically-supported psychotherapy and evaluation services to the Triangle area. Moreover, The Purpose Center offers a variety of forensic psychological services, oftentimes working for and consulting legal organizations and the courts. The Purpose Center offers a holistic care approach, aiming to have clients maximize their full potential. 

I started off my site visit by getting to meet (virtually) with Dr. Julianne Ludlam and our Gil intern, Kariss Cone. Dr. Julianne Ludlam is a psychologist and the training director for The Purpose Center. Dr. Ludlam has a wide range of responsibilities, but is primarily focused on evaluation services. On top of providing psychological evaluations for clients, she trains new employees on procedures related to and the administration of evaluations. Dr. Ludlam creates the training curriculum surrounding evaluation services and updates evaluation protocols with the most recent scientific advancements. This ensures that the evaluation services provided by The Purpose Center are up to date and efficacious at detecting underlying mental health issues. Dr. Ludlam also informed me that she has been working on a research project with our Gil interns, like Kariss, focused on clinician personal bias. This project investigates whether clinicians may be evaluating people differently based on sociodemographic characteristics, like race and ethnicity, and or socioeconomic status.

Outside of their personal role at The Purpose Center, Dr. Ludlam went into detail about other unique projects and community outreach their private practice does. One of Kariss’s other mentors, Dr. Katrina Kuzyszyn-Jones (the founder of The Purpose Center), frequently works with law students in the Triangle area. Dr. Kuzyszyn-Jones gives presentations teaching them how to cope with the stressful nature of their employment and helping them develop a sense of professional civility. She also consults with many legal bodies, instructing attorneys/judges on how to be mediators concerning familial issues and providing advice to legal professionals regarding burnout. Another unique aspect of The Purpose Center, as described by Dr. Ludlam, is the co-parenting training offered by their practice, which is one of the only ones offered in the state of North Carolina. While our meeting was brief, Dr. Ludlam described why The Purpose Center is one of our most unique worksites, as it combines aspects of clinical and forensic psychology rarely taught to undergraduates at UNC.

After I met with Dr. Ludlam, Kariss and I broke off to discuss her role at the clinic. Kariss described her workflow as self-paced, working a hybrid schedule with a great degree of autonomy and trust from her superiors. Kariss’s workload is both treatment and evaluation-focused. For her treatment-focused workload, she helps prepare Dr. Kuzyszyn-Jones’ presentations that they give to law students, providing the research and logistical support needed to make sure these presentations stay updated. She also helps to create psychoeducational materials to be distributed and writes articles for The Purpose Center’s website. For her evaluation-focused workload, she codes client responses to evaluations, assists/observes client case conceptualizations, and conducts research for Dr. Ludlam to ensure evaluation protocols remain up to date. In terms of larger projects, Kariss is assisting Dr. Ludlam with her clinician's personal bias study and shadows the weekly co-parenting training sessions. 

Kariss detailed in our site visit that this internship experience helped to provide clarity regarding her professional goals. Kariss was torn between whether to pursue a clinical or social Ph.D. program, but her worksite experience allowed her to see how clinics operated and understand the importance of social dynamics within these settings. As a result, Kariss is now determined to pursue a Ph.D. in social psychology, aiming to study health disparities and inequities along with bias and prejudice so as to better help marginalized communities receive care. After graduating in May, Kariss hopes to work as a lab manager or research coordinator to better refine her research skills before she starts her Ph.D. track. 

Future Gil interns interested in The Purpose Center as a worksite can expect an enriching internship experience, where an intern will work closely with clinicians to better understand the two sides of clinical work: evaluation and treatment. Moreover, Gil interns can expect to be exposed to forensic psychology, learning how a psychologist works in the legal space. Lastly, future interns can expect to receive invaluable advice from a diversified set of professionals, all of whom have expertise in forensic and clinical psychology.

I was extremely impressed not only by the work Kariss has done, but by the overall work conducted at The Purpose Center and how Kariss helps to contribute to that. We thank Dr. Ludlam, Dr. Kuzyszyn-Jones, and other staff at The Purpose Center for mentoring and supporting Kariss. The Gil team is proud to have such a long-standing partnership with The Purpose Center (9 years long!), and we hope future Gil interns can further contribute to this amazing clinic, just as Kariss and so many other former Gil interns have done.