Katherine Shear

Dr. Shear is the Marion E. Kenworthy Professor of Psychiatry and the founding Director of the Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia School of Social Work. Dr. Shear is a clinical researcher who first worked in anxiety and depression. For the last two and a half decades she has focused on understanding and treating people who experience persistent intense grief. She developed and tested complicated grief therapy (CGT), a short-term targeted intervention and confirmed its efficacy in three large NIMH-funded studies. She has also worked in collaboration with USU on projects related to military family bereavement. Dr. Shear is widely recognized for her work in bereavement, including both research and clinical awards from the Association for Death Education and Counseling and invited authorship of articles for UpToDate and the New England Journal of Medicine.