Docente

Ph.D is a licensed clinical psychologist who brings 30 years of youth and family focused experience across a range of sectors including public and private school education, community mental health, crisis response, health care/hospital, legal, non-profit, residential, and undergraduate and graduate training. She has served as direct service provider (high school teacher and psychologist), researcher and program evaluator, consultant, supervisor, trainer, professor, and executive leadership. She specializes in strategic planning, program development, and evaluation design. Her overarching expertise is in trauma specific services, and trauma-responsive care. For the last 15 years, she has served in leadership roles in non-profits, with a few years as director of a doctoral program at CSPP at Alliant International University. Leadership positions have included serving as Director of Behavioral Health at a non-profit in Marin, Vice President of Clinical and Trauma Programming and former interim CEO at a residential center/therapeutic high school with a nascent community outpatient mental health center, and Director of Research and Evaluation at a youth serving multimodal nonprofit in San Francisco.

During her years at the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, she served as chair for the Cultural Diversity Special Interest Group and member of the Diversity Committee to ISTSS’s board. She is an affiliate member of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network and a part of the first co-hort of trainers for the national Complex Trauma Training Consortium.

Dr. Smith has experience presenting and training in the area of child trauma, adult trauma, complex trauma, and post traumatic stress disorder at the local, national, and international levels. She also has published several articles and book chapters in the field of trauma and is a co-editor of the book, International Perspectives on Traumatic Stress. Her most recent publications is the article Appeasement: Replacing Stockholm Syndrome as a Definition of a Survival Strategy in European Journal of Psychotraumatology, and the chapter, Complementary Healing Practices in Ford & Courtois’ Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders: Scientific Foundations and Therapeutic Models. Current foci include the neurophysiological impact of complex trauma, innovative body-based interventions for trauma, and implementing trauma-informed systems. To that end, Dr. Smith has worked on helping develop trauma-informed practices for numerous schools, youth-serving agencies, and government departments.

Dr. Smith earned a Bachelor’s in English and Psychology from Georgetown University, a teaching credential and Master’s in Education from Stanford Teacher Education Program (Stanford University) (the S.T.E.P. multicultural education program), and a Ph.D. from University of Connecticut. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Trauma Center in Boston/Brookline.