News and Events
Grant Awarded to the Clinical Psychology PsyD Program
On September 25, 2012, Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology’s Clinical Program (PsyD) was awarded a grant for $470,782 by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius through the Mental and Behavioral Health Education and Training Grant (MBHETG) program, which was authorized as a part of the Affordable Care Act. HRSA received hundreds of applications for this grant and only eleven clinical programs across the country were awarded this grant, which will be used to support three-years of pre-doctoral internship training.
The Clinical Program (PsyD) at Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology (FGSP), Yeshiva University (YU), in collaboration with Bronx Psychiatric Center (BPC ) will use this grant to create an innovative SPMI training program (The Collaborative Training Program to Provide a Continuum of Competent Care to Underserved, Severely and Persistently Mentally Ill Populations CPT-SPMI) that will include the creation of an affiliated internship program. The CTP-SPMI will provide comprehensive training to graduate students in the assessment and treatment of severe and persistent mental illness. Through this unique partnership, the two programs will increase competent care to underserved, severely and persistently mentally ill populations by (a) directly training students in the clinical program and (b) by creating an exportable curriculum that will be disseminated to other graduate clinical programs and internship programs, with the hope that they will use this training model to develop similar programs. Read the official university press release
Internship Match
The internship match rate for the Ferkauf Clinical Psychology Program is usually comparable to or exceeds the national average. This year, our match rate was 96 percent. By comparison, the national average was 74 percent. As usual, our students matched at all top sites including Bellevue, Brooklyn VA, LIJ/Northshore, Manhattan VA, Mt. Sinai, New York-Presbyterian, St. Lukes Medical Center, and Yale. Fourty-one percent of matched students matched with their first choice, and 75 percent matched with one of their top three choices.
Student News
Rachel Edelman and Erin King, two current third-year students, are campus representatives for the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students (APAGS). As part of this role, they will be communicating with the student body about Action Alerts from the APA, so that students are aware of issues facing psychologists and have an opportunity to take action if they choose to. They will also be informing students of other important issues related to the APA.
Alumni News
Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology of Yeshiva University have found that personality traits like being outgoing, optimistic, easygoing, and enjoying laughter as well as staying engaged in activities may also be part of the longevity genes mix. The study is titled “Positive attitude towards life and emotional expression as personality phenotypes for centenarians,” and was aimed at detecting genetically-based personality characteristics by developing a brief measure (the Personality Outlook Profile Scale, or POPS) of personality in centenarians.The POPS was developed by lead author Kaori Kato, Psy.D., now at Weill Cornell Medical College, who validated it through comparisons with two previously established measures of personality traits. Other authors of the study were Nir Barzilai, M.D., the Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Chair of Aging Research, director of Einstein’s Institute for Aging Research and co-corresponding author of the study, Richard Zweig, Ph.D., assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Einstein and director of the Older Adult Program at Ferkauf's Clinical Psychology Psy.D. program, and Gil Atzmon, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine and of genetics at Einstein. Read more about the study.
New Harbinger Publications released Dr. Jenny Taitz's first popular audience book, End Emotional Eating. The book introduces the latest scientifically supported theories and strategies to manage emotions to live purposefully in an accessibly and entertaining manner. Unlike many books on the topic of eating, Dr. Taitz's book focuses on attention, regulating emotions and distress, and participating rather than feeling preoccupied by feelings and food. Read more about the book and Dr. Taitz by viewing her website, drjennytaitz.com.
Faculty News
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, Tenure-Track. The clinical program seeks to hire two tenure-track Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology to start in Fall, 2013. Candidates in all areas of clinical psychology will be considered, although strong preference will be given to applicants with a research focus on one or more of the following: quantitative and research methods, assessment, eating disorders, women’s issues, substance abuse, cross-cultural and cross-socioeconomic research, severe and persistent mental illness including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and personality disorders. Read more about the positions, application procedures, and the clinical program.
Dr. John Pachankis, assistant professor in the Clinical Psychology PsyD Program, is the Principle Investigator (PI) on a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to create the first-ever intervention to reduce minority stress among gay and bisexual men. The intervention aims to reduce the health disparities faced by this population. Despite the well-established findings that gay and bisexual men experience 1) disproportionate stress exposure as a result of their sexual orientation (i.e., minority stress), 2) disproportionate rates of stress-sensitive mental health disorders (e.g., depression, anxiety), and 3) a synergistic combination of these disparities that fuels behavioral risk for HIV, no intervention targets minority stress and related mental health disorders in order to reduce HIV risk among HIV-uninfected gay and bisexual men. This project develops the first theoretically-driven intervention that powerfully reduces the underlying mechanisms linking gay and bisexual men's minority stress and related mental health problems to HIV risk behavior. Read more about this exciting research project>>.
Dr. Lata K. McGinn, director of the clinical program, became president of the International Association for Cognitive Psychotherapy (IACP) in June 2011. Her book, Treatment Plans and Interventions, came out on Guildford Press in Fall 2011. She has been elected the representative-at-large of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT).