October 2010: Gil Tippy, Psy.D.

Dr. Gil Tippy is the Clinical Director and a Founder of the Rebecca School in New York, NY. The Rebecca School is a therapeutic day school for children 4 to 21 with neurodevelopmental disorders of relating and communication, including PDD and autism. Utilizing the Developmental, Individual difference, Relationship-based model (DIR) which has as its core belief that relationships are the foundation of learning, Dr. Tippy helps to develop a specialized clinical program for each child based on his/her own individual motor and sensory processing issues as well as unique strengths. He is in private practice in Oyster Bay, New York where he sees children and adults who are not on the developmental spectrum, and he is the founder of a not for profit foundation specializing in providing developmental services consistent with the DIR/Floortime philosophy.

Dr. Tippy received his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Long Island University, C.W. Post, as part of the entering Class of 1993. He has been either a teacher or a psychologist for the last 32 years. He was directly supervised by Stanley Greenspan, M.D., who created the DIR model. Dr. Tippy is also a well known author and speaker. He recently co-authored a book with Dr. Greenspan, Case Studies in DIR/Floortime Model in the School Setting: The Rebecca School Casebook for Parents and Professionals. He also co-authored a journal article, Attachment and Autism: Parental Attachment Representations and Relational Behaviors in the Parent-Child Dyad (Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2010) as well as contributed a chapter on DIR/Floortime in the book, Cutting Edge Therapies for Autism 2010-2011 (Seri & Lyons, 2010). His most recent speaking engagements include a talk entitled, A Complicated Friendship: DIR and Music Therapy, at the annual conference of the Mid-Atlantic Region of the American Music Therapy Association in Pittsburgh, PA and a talk entitled, School as Home in Autism, at Columbia University Children’s Rights Group at Columbia University in New York, NY.

Dr. Tippys’s core research interests lie in the area of child development, parental attachment, ASD and PDD. For further information, Dr. Tippy can be reached via his Child Development Blog at http://drgiltippy.wordpress.com, his facebook account, http://www.facebook.com/ people/Gil-Tippy/708181508, his twitter account, http://twitter.com/DrGilTippy or by email at Drtippy@hotmail.com.