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ISTSS Leadership

ISTSS is run by a committed group of elected and unelected volunteers drawn from the various trauma-related disciplines around the world. The organization is governed by a Board of Directors consisting of 21 members, including a membership-elected Executive Committee and several ex-officio (non-voting) members. Each year, ISTSS holds an open election to fill expiring board terms and the President-Elect position. Board Members serve a three year term and the President serves for one year.

Information about these positions, as well as their current occupants, can be found below. Additionally, there is information about Liaisons, Editors, and Past Presidents below.

Executive Committee

The Executive Committee consists of: President, Vice President, President-Elect, Secretary, Treasurer, and Past-President. The roles of each are described below:

President:

To support  organizational excellence through engagement of ISTSS membership and development of new leadership.

Executive Liaison to:  Program Committee, Awards Committee, Leadership Task Force, Past Presidents Council, Annual Meeting Committee and History of ISTSS Task Force.

Vice President:

To promote communication and exchange of knowledge within and beyond ISTSS through development in new media and communication technology.

Executive Liaison to: Distance Learning: Expert Training, Distance Learning: Webinars, Distance Learning: JTS, JTS Editor, Ombudsperson, StressPoints Editor and Website Editor.

President-Elect:

To identify mechanisms to increase sense of professional home and to support collaboration and effective exchange of knowledge among ISTSS research, practitioners and  policymakers.

Executive Liaisons to: Diversity Committee, Learning Collaborative Task Force, Membership Committee, One Day Meetings Task Force, Social Networking Task Force, Special Interest Groups (SIGs), Student Section.

Secretary:

To promote advancement of  societal impact through influence on policy activities and strengthening relationships to other organizations.

Executive Liaison to: American Psychological Association (APA), Division 56,  International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), DART Center,  Public Policy Committee, Public Education Committee Coalition for the International Courtand and United Nations Representatives.

Treasurer:

To protect and increase the Society's resources.

Executive Liaison to: Audit Committee, Finance Committee,  Student Grants Committee, Travel Grants Committee, Data Infastructure Committee.

Past-President:

To guide development of an organizational model that is responsive to issues, members and stakeholders from all nations.

Executive Liaison to: Nominations Committee, International Structure & Affiliations Committee,  World Congress Meeting (Mexico City), Global Initiative Task Force, Organizational Excellence Task Force and Complex Trauma Task Force. 

2012-2013 Executive Committee 

Karestan C. Koenen, PhD
President

kck5@columbia.edu

Dr. Koenen is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Her research uses a life course approach to understand the interplay of genetic and environmental factors in the etiology of posttraumatic stress disorder and other post-trauma mental disorders.

 

Miranda Olff, PhD
Vice President

m.olff@amc.uva.nl 

Prof. Dr. Olff leads the Department of Psychiatry’s Center for Psychological Trauma in the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam for the last 10 years. Since 2011 she is employed part-time by Arq Psychotrauma Expert Group which supports and binds together organizations that specialize in psychological trauma. She also has a visiting professorship in Norway. Dr. Olff has been a member of ISTSS for over 20 years and was the president of the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS) in 2009-2011, having been on the ESTSS Board since 2005. She is editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Psychotraumatology.

Dean G. Kilpatrick, PhD 
Treasurer

kilpatdg@musc.edu

Dr. Kilpatrick is a distinguished university professor of clinical psychology and director of the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, Medical University of South Carolina. He is a past president of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies. His research focuses primarily on understanding the scope, nature, and mental health impact of exposure to potentially traumatic events among adolescents and adults as well as risk and protective factors among those who have been exposed.

Grete A. Dyb, MD, PhD
Secretary

grete.dyb@nkvts.unirand.no

Dr. Dyb is currently the head of the department of children and adolescents at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies and an associate professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo. She had been commited to trauma research and clinical work with children and adolescents exposed to sexual abuse, violence and disasters over many years. Dr. Dyb has also served on scientific committees for both European and Nordic conferences on trauma and abuse of children and at the ISTSS task force on how to bridge clinical practice issues to research.

Nancy Kassam-Adams, PhD
President-Elect

nlkaphd@mail.med.upenn.edu

Dr. Kassam-Adams is associate director for behavioral research at the Center for Injury Research & Prevention and directs the Center for Pediatric Traumatic Stress, at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She is a research associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.  Her research focuses on understanding the impact of injury, illness, and other acute events for children and parents, and on developing effective screening and secondary prevention in pediatric health care settings and via the web.

Eve Carlson, PhD
Past President

eve.at.istss@gmail.com

Dr. Carlson is a Research Health Scientist Specialist at the National Center for PTSD. Her research focuses on the impact of traumatic stress and developing and validating innovative and clinically useful measures of trauma exposure and responses (including the first widely used measure dissociation).

2012-2013 Board of Directors

Alain Brunet, PhD

alain.brunet@mcgill.ca

Dr. Brunet is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University and Director of the Douglas-McGill Traumatic Stress Laboratory. An ISTSS member for 20 years, Dr. Brunet has been active in society governance, serving as a board representative of the Canadian Psychological Association, acting editor of the Journal of Traumatic Stress, and a member of the 2010 Annual Meeting organizing committee in Montreal.

Kathleen Chard, PhD

kathleen.chard@va.gov

Dr. Chard is VA CPT Implementation Director and Director PTSD and Anxiety Disorders Division, Cincinnati VA Medical Center as well as an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Chard has worked for nearly two decades with trauma survivors in a variety of settings, including an academic research setting, private practice, a forensic clinic, and currently the Department of Veterans Affairs. Her research focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of treatments for PTSD related to child abuse, combat, rape and assault.

Joan Cook, PhD

joan.cook@yale.edu

Dr. Cook is an associate professor in the Yale School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and is a researcher at the National Center for PTSD. She has numerous publications in the traumatic stress and geriatric mental health fields, including scientific papers on the phenomenology, assessment and treatment of older adult trauma survivors. She is currently funded by the National Institute of Mental Health to study the dissemination and implementation of effective mental health services in the community.

Diane Elmore, PhD, MPH

diane.elmore@duke.edu

Dr. Elmore is Director of the Policy Program for the UCLA-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University. Previously she served as the Associate Executive Director of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Public Interest Government Relations Office, Director of the APA Congressional Fellowship Program, and coordinator of APA activities related to military service members, Veterans, and their families. Dr. Elmore informs, educates, and advises policymakers on a variety of important issues related to trauma, violence, and abuse.

Charles Engel, MD, MPH

charles.engel@us.army.mil

Dr. Engel is a Colonel in the United States Army and associate chair of the Uniformed Services University's Department of Psychiatry. He is the director of the Deployment Health Clinical Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and co-author of numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles, reviews and book chapters including papers in The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA.

Julian Ford, PhD

JFord@uchc.edu

Dr. Ford is associate professor of psychiatry, University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Dr. Ford has published scholarly clinical and clinical research studies with more than 50 colleagues and trainees internationally, two textbooks (Kendall & Ford, 1982,  Clinical Psychology: Scientific and Professional Dimensions, Wiley; Ford, May 2009,  Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,  Elsevier), and three recent edited books (Brom, Pat-Horenczyk & Ford, 2008,  Treating Traumatized Children, Routledge; Reyes, Elhai & Ford, 2008,  Encyclopedia of Psychological Trauma, Wiley; Courtois & Ford, February 2009,  Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders, Guilford).

Yoshiharu Kim, MD, PhD

kim@ncnp.go.jp 

Dr. Kim is the President, National Center of Disaster Mental Health and works in close collaboration with Japanese government to promote effective treatment of PTSD and elaborate post-disaster countermeasures, as well as to educate mental health care professionals, in addition to doing trauma treatment himself.  He is one of the founders of the Japanese Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (JSTSS) and was the president of its launching congress in 2002, and formed an affiliation with ISTSS during his presidency in 2006.

Harold Kudler, MD

hkudler@duke.edu

Dr. Kudler is associate clinical professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University; coordinator, Mental Health Service Line, associate director, Post Deployment Mental Illness Research, Education & Clinical Center (MIRECC), Mid-Atlantic Veterans Integrated Service Network, Department of Veterans Affairs, Durham, North Carolina. He treats combat veterans, ex-prisoners of war, other trauma survivors, and their families and works to advance VA's response to the mental health needs of returning combat veterans and their families

Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD

ruth.lanius@lhsc.on.ca

Dr. Lanius is an associate professor and the Harris-Woodman Chair for Department of Psychiatry at University of Western Ontario. Dr. Lanius has extensive experience with PTSD from both a clinical and neuroscience research perspective. She has received several federally funded grants to study emotion processing in individuals with PTSD related to childhood abuse and have published many articles focusing on the neurobiology underlying this type of PTSD. Additionally, her work has focused on the clinical implications of the neurobiological research.

Kathryn Magruder, MPH, PhD

magrudkm@musc.edu

Dr. Kathryn Magruder is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Division of Military Science at the Medical University of South Carolina and Research Health Scientist at the VA Medical Center in Charleston, South Carolina.  Research focuses on studying and understanding trauma, stress, and PTSD. This includes achieving competitive funding for a number of large grants, numerous publications and presentations, organizing conferences and symposia (including the "Mapping the Landscape of Deployment Related Adjustment and Mental Disorders" workshop co-sponsored by VA, NIMH, and DoD), serving as a peer reviewer for journals, and serving as a reviewer on various study sections (including VA, NIH, and DoD).

Candice Monson, PhD

candice.monson@psych.ryerson.ca

Dr. Monson is associate professor of psychology and director of clinical training at Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She received a U.S. Veterans Affairs Career Development Award with an emphasis in psychotherapy trials for PTSD in 2004, conducting the first randomized controlled trial of cognitive processing therapy (CPT) for military-related PTSD. In 2004, she was named deputy director of the Women's Health Sciences Division of the U.S. Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD and was promoted to associate professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine in 2005.

Daniel Mosca, MD

danimosca07@gmail.com

Dr. Mosca is a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry and director of the trauma center at the Alvear Psychiatric Emergency Hospital, the Director of the Trauma Center at the Public Health Institute of the National University of Buenos Aires, and the director of the Human Factors Team (the Intervention Team for Traumatic Events of the EMS, Public Emergency Medical System of Buenos Aires). For 18 years, Dr. Mosca has been working directly in the treatment of individuals and groups affected by traumatic events and organizing the response teams for disasters in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Dr. Mosca is also one of the founding members of Argentine Society for Psychotrauma, now an ISTSS affiliate.

Gladys Mwiti, PhD

glmwiti@oasisafrica.co.ke

Dr. Mwiti is the founder and CEO of Oasis Africa. Oasis Africa has spearheaded trauma interventions after traumatic events such as 1994 Rwanda genocide, 1998 Nairobi USA Embassy bombing, 2001 Gujarat earthquake, 2007 Kenya post-election violence, ongoing civil strife in Burundi, trauma related to HIV/AIDS bereavement especially regarding the care of orphans and vulnerable children, as well as member care for humanitarian staff working in trauma-ridden zones.

Meaghan O'Donnell, PhD

mod@unimelb.edu.au

Dr. O'Donnell is a research director at the Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health (ACPMH) and associate professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne. Her research particularly focuses on early interventions following trauma, and the development of interventions that have a high degree of ecological validity.

Eric Vermetten, MD, PhD

e.vermetten@umcutrecht.nl 

Dr. Vermetten is the head of research in Military Mental Health for the Netherlands Department of Defense (holding the rank of Colonel) as well as associate professor of psychiatry at the University Medical Center Utrecht.  Dr. Vermetten's major area of research has been in the field of traumatic stress, specifically the concept of true prospective studies to explore the biological contribution to trauma-related disorders. Dr. Vermetten has also been active in medical hypnosis and served as president of the International Society of Hypnosis as well as a member of several review committees, editorial boards and currently involved in NATO panels on a diversity of military mental health issues

Ex-Officio Board Positions and Representatives

Association de Langue Francaise pour l'Etude du Stress et du Traumatisme (ALFEST)
Prof Humbert Boisseaux
humbert.boisseaux@wanadoo.fr

Australasian Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ASTSS)
Dr. Justin Kenardy
j.kenardy@uq.edu.au

Canadian Psychological Association, Traumatic Stress Section (CPA TSS)
Assoc. Professor Catherine Classen, PhD, C. Psych
Catherine.Classen@wchospital.ca

Deutschsprachige Gesellschaft Fur Psychotraumatologie (DeGPT)
Dr. Julia Schellong
julia.schellong@uniklinikum-dresden.de

European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS)
Dr Brigitte Lueger-Schuster
brigitte.lueger-schuster@univie.ac.at 

Japanese Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (JSTSS)
Masaharu Maeda, MD
maeda_masaharu@kurume-u.ac.jp 

Sociedad Argentina De Psicotrauma(SAPsi)
Daniel Mosca, MD
danimosca07@gmail.com

Journal of Traumatic Stress
Editor: Daniel Weiss, PhD
daniel.weiss@ucsf.edu

Traumatic StressPoints
Editor: Patricia Kerig, PhD
p.kerig@psych.utah.edu 

Website Editor

Eric Kuhn, PhD
kuhneric@hotmail.com  

Liaisons

APA Division 56
Diane Elmore, PhD
delmore@apa.org

Dart Center
Elana Newman, PhD
elana-newman@utulsa.edu

Bruce Shapiro
bruce.shapiro@gmail.com  

International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD)

Christine Courtois, PhD
cacourtois@aol.com 

Student Section

Namik Kirlic
namik-kirlic@utulsa.edu 

UN Representatives

Yael Danieli, PhD 
yaeld@aol.com 

Editors

Journal of Traumatic Stress Editor
The ISTSS Journal of Traumatic Stress (JTS) Editor is expected to take responsibility for the peer review process that produces the articles published in the JTS the premier peer-reviewed scientific journal on traumatic stress.  JTS Editor Position Description

StressPoints Editor
The ISTSS Traumatic StressPoints editor is expected to take responsibility for the content of the Traumatic StressPoints, the ISTSS online newsletter.  StressPoints Editor Position Description

Website Editor
The ISTSS Web Editor (working with the headquarters editor and the ISTSS President as liaison to the Website Committee) is expected to take responsibility for the content, appearance, functionality and effectiveness of the website, and to ensure that it conforms to a clear policy agreed upon by the ISTSS board.  Website Editor Position Description 

Past Presidents