Jennifer Schwartz, PhD
Director, Psychological Services Center
Teaching Professor
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Research Interests:
Adult Psychopathology; Evidence-Based Practice; Competency-Based Training; Competency-Based Clinical Supervision
How My Work Makes A Difference:
Schwartz directs a community facing mental health facility that provides low-cost and high quality services to members of the surrounding community. She brings treatments that are often difficult to access due to cost and distance to individuals who would often not be able to receive such services. Schwartz has built partnerships between the Drexel Psychological Services Center (PSC) and other service agencies so that mental health benefits now augment community initiatives. More importantly, given that the PSC is a training site, Schwartz, through her work at the PSC, instills the values of social justice and giving back to the community in those who are being trained. The PSC does not just model this for students, but teaches them how to build and evaluate such programs.
Bio:
Jennifer Schwartz, PhD, is an associate teaching professor and director of the Psychological Services Center (PSC) in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. She is a Clinical Psychologist who received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Idaho State University in 2004. She did her postdoctoral internship at Vanderbilt University with placements in Adult Psychiatry and the Nashville Veterans Administration. She did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Psychopathology Research Unit and Center for Cognitive Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania. Schwartz has been a training clinic director since 2005 and was the inaugural clinic director of Drexel Psychological Services Center (PSC) that began in 2013. Schwartz serves on the executive board of the Association of Psychology Training Clinics (APTC) and is an elected member of the American Psychological Association Ethics Committee.
Professor Schwartz is the director of the PSC at Drexel University, a training clinic that serves the Philadelphia community. There, graduate students in the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program at Drexel are trained in state-of-the-art therapeutic approaches of patient assessment and treatment. Schwartz trains cognitive-behavioral intervention techniques and is heavily invested in utilizing the competency-based model to foster student development as research-informed clinicians. She also utilizes competency-based supervision approaches in her own work with trainees. Schwartz embraces emerging technologies as tools for enhancing patient care and facilitating training of graduate students. In addition to her work with graduate students, she also enjoys working with undergraduate students and exciting them about the field of psychology. She values critical-thinking skills and weaves training in this domain into her courses.
Professor Schwartz has mentored students at the undergraduate and masters level of training. The focus of her research is on best practices in training and supervising. While this area is specific, students have found that the principles and methodologies utilized to explore research questions translate to many other domains.