Biography

Personal - Biographical Sketch 

I grew up all over the world. When I was four and a half, my dad joined the foreign service, and our family embarked on a great adventure. I lived in Tunis, Tunisia where I attended a French kindergarden and learned a smattering of Arabic.  We then moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, then Montevideo, Uruguay where I attended Argentinian-American and Uruguayan-American schools and learned Spanish.  And on to Bangkok, Thailand where I attended an International school but didn’t learn much Thai.  My last post was San Salvador, El Salvador where I attended an International school and remembered and used my Spanish but with a different accent.

The experience prepared me in a unique way for a career as a psychologist. In fact, recent research suggests that people with this kind of global background tend to wind up as communicators and mediators. Understanding others from diverse backgrounds just seems to be the "family business".

After attending high school in the U.S., I came to Durham to attend Duke University, where I majored in English and Psychology. I graduated with honors and went to the University of Kentucky for my graduate education and came back to North Carolina for my pre-doctoral internship in Medical Psychology at Duke University Medical Center.

During graduate school I became interested in behavioral medicine and did a dissertation on postpartum depression in couples. I found that adjusting to the birth of a first child can be difficult for men as well as for women. This is far from the biologically determined, hormone driven response it is widely assumed to be. Research done since then has confirmed my findings.  After many years of clinical practice specializing in reproductive health psychology, I have finally resurrected my dissertation and brought the research up to date.  My book After The Stork: The Couple’s Guide to Preventing and Overcoming Postpartum Depression  is published by New Harbinger Press and available in a bookstore near you, or with a 15% discount, from this website.