Joanna Stern, Psy.D. graduated from the LIU Post clinical psychology doctoral program in 2009. Her dissertation was titled Engaging Fathers in Behavioral Group Parent Training for Disruptive Behavior: A Pilot Study. When deciding to pursue psychology as a career, Dr. Stern credits formative college summers spent working as a counselor at the NYU Child Study Center’s Summer Program for Kids, a behaviorally-based summer program for kids with ADHD and other behavioral disorders. She remembers choosing to enroll at Post because she found the program welcoming in a way that she did not experience during her interviews at other programs.
Dr. Stern recalls how the program’s dual theoretical orientation later shaped her professional interests. Dr. Stern remembers her initial desire to do CBT work with Dr. David Roll before gradually developing additional interests first in the psychodynamic orientation and later in family therapy and DBT. Her subsequent clinical training has been equally diverse, and for her post-doctoral fellowship she returned to her behavioral origins as a child fellow at the North Shore-LIJ Health System (now Northwell Health). After a brief stint as a psychologist at a residential treatment center for adolescents in Westchester, Dr. Stern spent the next four and a half years working at the New York City Children’s Center, Bronx Campus (formerly known as Bronx Children’s Psychiatric Center), a state inpatient psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents with severe trauma and emotional disturbance. It was during her years at Bronx Children’s that Dr. Stern first became a supervisor of psychology externs, which marked the beginning of her strong interest in and commitment to providing high-quality psychology training.
Since August 2015, Dr. Stern has been the Assistant Clinical Director of the Outpatient Department of the Child and Family Institute at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan. Dr. Stern divides her time among multiple roles: providing individual, family and group therapy to a relatively diverse clinic population, including within the adolescent DBT program; overseeing the other outpatient child psychologists as the director of outpatient child psychology; and providing clinical supervision for psychology externs, interns and post-doctoral fellows. In her free time, Dr. Stern describes herself as the “cruise director” for her very opinionated almost-four year-old daughter.