Early Career

After graduating from Duke University (Gender/Psychology), I helped implement a full-time staff position on campus to coordinate student health and promote student initiatives directed at treating and preventing eating disorders.

In graduate school, I assisted in a longitudinal research project pioneered by Dr. Ruth McRoy exploring adjustment and identity issues for transracial adoptees. In Austin I also worked at a safe shelter with survivors of intimacy violence and on a project exploring the dynamics of female perpetrators of childhood sexual abuse.

I served for nine years as book review editor of the Eating Disorders Journal of Treatment and Prevention, and remained a member of its editorial board. In 1999, I was the youngest professional to join the Board of The American Anorexia and Bulimia Association, and in 2001 I was a founding member of the National Eating Disorders Association. I served on NEDA’s Scientific Clinical Advisory Board as well.

For a decade, I was a member of The Body Attachment Group, affiliated with the New School for Social Research. Together with an international team of feminist psychoanalysts, body and movement therapists, and infant attachment researchers, this group studied the transgenerational transmission of anxiety in the body from caregiver to child. The Body Attachment Group presented its innovative clinical and qualitative findings at the American Psychological Association conference and at psychoanalytic institutes in New York, culminating in the publication of a diagnostic tool called the BODI.

As an adjunct faculty member at NYU and a guest lecturer at several NYC psychoanalytic institutes (e.g., ICP, Gestalt Institute, The WTCI, WAWI), I have taught courses in Gender Trauma, Object Relations Theory, Weight Bias and Fat Acceptance, Critical Approaches to Cosmetic & Weight Loss Surgery, Transgender Health, and Attachment Theory.

Training

Duke University, BA, 1991-1995​

  • Distinguished Research Award in Human Development
  • Dora Anne Little Service Award for feminist and community contributions
  • William Griffith Award recognizing feminist scholarship and activism

University of Texas at Austin, MSW, 1996-1998

The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, feminist psychoanalytic training, 1998-2002

  • ​Co-Director of Clinical Training, 2012-2019
  • Board Member, 2011-2019

New York University, PhD, 2002-2008

  • Fahs Beck Scholar

Philadelphia Center for Psychoanalysis, Post-Doctoral Fellow, 2008-2010

The Stephen Mitchell Center, Advanced Clinical Program, 2010

New Directions Writing Program, Graduate and Guest Faculty, 2009-2012

New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy, 2011-2017

  • Member of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis Committee on Gender and Sexualities, 2018-present
  • Member of The NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis Committee on Ethnicity, Race, Culture, Class & Language, 2018-present