Research Department Faculty and Staff

Lynne Knobloch-Fedders, PhD, Director of Research, Kovler Scholar

Dr. Lynne Knobloch-Fedders is the Director of Research and Kovler Scholar at The Family Institute at Northwestern University and a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology and theology from Marquette University in 1996, received her PhD in clinical psychology in 2001 from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and completed the John J.B. Morgan Postgraduate Fellowship at The Family Institute at Northwestern University in 2003, specializing in couple and family therapy and applied clinical research.

Dr. Knobloch-Fedders conducts research in two related areas. Her primary focus is on the development of her program of research, Depression, Anxiety, and Relationship Distress in Couples. In this work, she studies the ways in which couples' interpersonal behavior is associated with depression, anxiety, and relationship distress, and how these factors predict treatment response in couple psychotherapy. She also collaborates on the Psychotherapy Change Project, with a particular interest in understanding how relationships between therapists and patients are associated with treatment response in individual, couple, and family psychotherapy. She is also member of the editorial board of the journal Family Process.

In 2004, Dr. Knobloch-Fedders received the Randy Gerson Memorial Research Award from the American Psychology Foundation to support her research investigating the associations between interpersonal behavior, relationship distress, and depression in couples.

Tara Latta, Director, Psychotherapy Change Project

Jay Lebow, PhD

Dr. Jay Lebow's research has centered on the interface of research and practice, the evaluation of psychotherapy outcome, and the effectiveness of mental health treatment and of couple and family therapy. He currently is Clinical Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University.

A graduate of Northwestern University's PhD program in Psychology, he served as Director of Program Evaluation for the DuPage County Health Department's Mental Health Division and subsequently for the Institute of Psychiatry at Northwestern Medical School early in his career. During this time he conducted projects in health and mental health program evaluation and authored a number of highly influential papers focused on mental health program evaluation and more specifically consumer assessments of mental health treatment including a paper on this subject for Psychological Bulletin.

After moving to The Family Institute in 1982, he served for several years as Director of Research. He also has served as the Chair of the Research Committee for the American Family Therapy Academy and President of the Society of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association. While at The Family Institute at Northwestern University, he has authored a number of important reviews of treatments for couples and families including a chapter for the Annual Review of Psychology reviewing the research on family therapy, two decade reviews for the Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy on couple therapy and research on couple therapy, a clinical update for the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists about evidence-based couple therapy, an article for The Journal of Family Psychology on relational diagnosis, and overviews of couple and family therapy research for Corsini's Encyclopedia of Psychology, The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion; the American Psychiatric Association's Textbook of Psychotherapeutic Treatments, and the journal In Session. He also has provided an overview of evidence-based psychotherapies for the widely-used physician web resource Up to Date.

Dr. Lebow has edited three volumes dealing with the practice of psychotherapy and is co-author of Common Factors in Couple and Family Therapy. He also has edited Family Psychology: The Art of the Science with William Pinsof. His interest in the interface between research and practice in psychotherapy is reflected in a regular column he writes in the Psychotherapy Networker and his latest book, Research for the Psychotherapist. Dr. Lebow also has collaborated with The Family Institute's Psychotherapy Change Project over the last ten years.

Jonathan Lee, PhD, Morgan Postgraduate Fellow
Dr. Jonathan Lee is the John J.B. Morgan Postdoctoral Fellow at The Family Institute at Northwestern University, completing advanced research and clinical training in individual, couples, and family therapy.

Dr. Lee received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts, where he was a member of the Acceptance, Mindfulness, and Emotion Lab under the mentorship of Dr. Susan Orsillo. Dr. Lee's research is focused on understanding the psychological processes that maintain and exacerbate psychological distress and impairment, and how these processes can be targeted through treatment with increased precision and potency. His research has specifically focused on examining the factors that are relevant to Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and understanding the psychotherapeutic mechanisms of treatments in both addressing symptom reduction and enhancing quality of life. Dr. Lee has published and presented at regional, national, and international research conferences in this area of research.

William Pinsof, PhD, President

William Pinsof is President of The Family Institute, Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern University, and the Director of the Center for Applied Psychological and Family Studies at Northwestern.

He received his PhD in clinical psychology from York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His academic and research work has focused on evaluating the outcome of Marriage and family therapy, understanding the process of marriage and family therapy, and the integration of different therapeutic approaches for maximal cost effectiveness.

Bill Pinsof's extensive publishing career includes four edited volumes, the most recent one, which he co-edited with Family Institute colleague, Jay Lebow, is entitled, "Family Psychology: The Art of the Science," published in 2005 by Oxford University Press.

His work on psychotherapy integration culminated in the publication, by Basic Books, of Integrative Problem Centered Therapy: A Synthesis of Family, Individual and Biological Therapies (1995). He has also edited three other books: a special issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy (1995) that he co-edited with Lyman C. Wynne, dedicated to reviewing all of the controlled research on the outcomes of couple and family therapy; a special issue of Family Process (Vol. 41, No. 2, summer 2002) entitled, "Marriage in the 20th Century in Western Civilization: Trends, Research, Therapy, and Perspectives"; and the classic work he co-edited with Leslie Greenberg The Psychotherapeutic Process: A Research Handbook, (1986) New York: Guilford Press.

Through the Psychotherapy Change Project, begun 10 years ago at The Family Institute, Bill Pinsof and his colleagues developed a client self-report instrument to measure change from an integrative and systemic perspective over the course of individual, couple and family therapy. This instrument, the Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change -- STIC® -- tracks patient change and feeds back the results to therapists through an online website. This system allows therapists to track change over the course of therapy. The STIC® comes in two forms: the Initial STIC® which takes 45 minutes to complete and is filled out prior to the first session with a therapist; and the STIC® Intersession which takes 5-7 minutes to complete and is filled out before each subsequent session. The STIC® and STIC® feedback system are providing the data needed to diagnose, guide and evaluate the treatment of patients.

The second instrument to come out of the Psychotherapy Change Project is the Integrative Therapy Session Report (ITSR). The ITSR will be used to describe and understand the therapists' behaviors that are linked to patient change from a multi-systemic perspective (family, individual, relationships).

Bill Pinsof is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a Diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology. He received the Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Family Therapy Research Award from the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy in 1996, the Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice Award from the American Family Therapy Academy in 2001, and the 2001 Family Psychologist of the Year from the American Psychological Association Division 43 - Family Psychology.

Tamara Sher, PhD, Vice President for Research
Dr. Tamara Goldman Sher is a licensed clinical psychologist and Vice President for Research at The Family Institute at Northwestern University. She received her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989 and completed her internship training at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. After completing her internship, she served on the medical school faculty at Rush for seven years. At Rush, she was head of the health psychology track of the internship program and Director of the Couples and Health program. In 1994, Dr. Sher moved to Illinois Institute of Technology where she progressed from Assistant Professor to Full Professor and Director of Clinical Training. Dr. Sher came to The Family Institute in 2011.

Dr. Sher's research interests are in two separate but related areas. First, she was trained to do couples research. Her interests here lie in assessing couples' communication, better understanding the issues around couples and psychopathology, and what differentiates happy from distressed couples. Secondly, Dr. Sher is a health psychologist, focusing on the impact of physical illness on functioning. She is interested in the healthy to sick process as well as the sick to healthy process and has conducted research on infertility, heart disease, and Multiple Sclerosis. Finally, what is most intriguing to Dr. Sher is the confluence of her two areas of interest, i.e. the effect of illness on couple functioning as well as the effect of couple functioning on the illness process. Projects in this area include the following: (a) couples and heart disease; (b) couples and surgery outcomes; (c) couples and HIV/AIDS; and (d) couples and cancer. Current projects are in the following areas: (a) how working with a couple improves adherence to doctor's recommendations following a cardiac event; (b) the effect of cochlear implants on couples functioning; and (c) anxiety and couples and adherence to therapy.

Dr. Sher is the author of dozens of research publications, a co-editor of a book published by the American Psychological Association (The Psychology of Couples and Illness) and serves on the editorial boards of Health Psychology and Journal of Family Therapy. She also maintains an active clinical practice specializing in the treatment of couples and individuals, especially those who are experiencing a medical illness.

Kenichi Shimokawa, PhD, Madigan Postgraduate Fellow

Dr. Kenichi (Ken) Shimokawa is the Madigan Postdoctoral Fellow at The Family Institute at Northwestern University, completing an advanced research and clinical training in individual, couples, and family therapy. Dr. Shimokawa received his PhD in clinical psychology from Brigham Young University. Prior to joining The Family Institute, he completed his pre-doctoral internship at University Counseling Center at University of Rochester.

Dr. Shimokawa's overarching research interest is to develop evidence-based practice of mental health services that attends to the individual client's progress in psychotherapy and adjusts treatments accordingly. He values the integration of both research-informed practice and practice-informed research in the service of improved client care. His research focuses on development and evaluation of psychotherapy quality assurance systems to better understand how people change throughout the course of therapy and to identify, and enhance the outcome of, those who are not experiencing desired progress in therapy. Dr. Shimokawa has published and presented at regional, national, and international research conferences in this area of research. His recent meta-analytic review of a psychotherapy quality assurance system was published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (Shimokawa, Lambert, & Smart, 2010).

As part of the Psychotherapy Change Project at The Family Institute, Dr. Shimokawa is actively involved in the development, evaluation, improvement, and implementation of the Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change (STIC®)-a self-report instrument that systematically keeps track of how people change throughout therapy-and the Integrative Therapy Session Report (ITSR)-an instrument designed to track therapist behavior. As an extension of his research and clinical interests, he seeks to develop ways to better understand and deliver culturally sensitive mental health care to people of ethnic, racial, and cultural minority background.

Erin Staab, Assistant Research Administrator

Erin Staab graduated from Northwestern University in 2010 with a BA in Sociology and Psychology. At The Family Institute, she supervises the research laboratory; manages the Depression, Anxiety, Relationship Distress, and Couples project; and assists with the Psychotherapy Change Project.

Richard Zinbarg, PhD, Patricia M. Nielsen Research Chair

Richard E. Zinbarg, PhD, received his doctorate in clinical psychology from Northwestern University in 1989, completed his internship at the Medical College of Pennsylvania with Dr. Edna Foa, and spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. David Barlow (at the time at The State University of New York at Albany). He has published almost 80 articles and chapters in the areas of anxiety disorders, clinical research methodology and measurement theory. Currently, he is Professor and Director of Clinical Training in the Psychology Department of Northwestern University. He is also the Patricia M. Nielsen Research Chair and Director of the Anxiety and Panic Treatment Program at The Family Institute at Northwestern University.

Dr. Zinbarg has served as the director of the Oregon Program for Anxiety Study and Treatment, project director for the DSM-IV Mixed Anxiety Depression field trial, a member of the DSM-IV Text Revision Mixed Anxiety Depression Subcommittee and is currently serving as an advisor to the DSM-V Task Force. He was an Associate Editor for the British Journal of Clinical Psychology and is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. His research interests focus on understanding the structure of anxiety and depression, risk factors for the development of anxiety and depressive disorders, clinical research methodology, developing more effective treatments for the anxiety disorders with a particular focus on generalized anxiety disorder, and basic measurement theory and techniques. Dr. Zinbarg's theoretical orientation is primarily cognitive-behavioral though his clinical work has also been influenced by motivational interviewing and related work on common factors of psychotherapy. Most recently, through his collaboration with colleagues at The Family Institute at Northwestern University, Dr. Zinbarg has also begun to incorporate systemic approaches to the understanding and treatment of anxiety disorders.