Josh R

Assistant Group Lead

Josh was born and raised in rural Ohio. After graduating high school, he spent two years giving service and teaching in areas all over Nevada. It was here where he saw his first mountains and knew that he would always live near them. And it was also here that he truly saw other people and knew he would always want to help them. For Josh, Psychology was the perfect college major. It was even worth the ridicule he got for giving up his Business Management degree. Josh found the field of psychology had a way of describing people and behaviors in a way that Josh had always understood but hadn’t ever been able to communicate. Before long, he was publishing research papers alongside his professors. His main focus was on adolescent moral development, investigating the factors that would predict behavioral and relationship outcomes.

Josh then jumped straight into an organizational behavior PhD program where his interests in thinking errors, social influence, and persuasion led him to conduct his master’s thesis investigating the persuasion of people’s deeply held moral beliefs.

During all of this, Josh also wondered about his own self, as he was prone to do. Josh ultimately decided that he would rather see the helping process happening in person rather than on a spreadsheet. So he took his MS in Business Management and left his academic career in search of something a little closer to real life. Now he works wilderness therapy and as so many times before, has been reminded of life’s constantly changing nature. Armed with the tools and the experience, Josh is out in his beloved mountains, passing along everything he’s learned to the kids and helping them to deal with challenges of their own.