As an undergraduate, I attended Harvard College, where I majored in Social Relations, an integrative department which included clinical and social psychology, anthropology, and sociology.

After completing college, I dedicated the earliest stage of my career to providing mental health services to underserved communities and subsequently worked as the Director of Outpatient Services at the Waccamaw Center, a community mental health agency serving the poorest counties in South Carolina.

After working in community mental heath for six years, I felt a need for additional training and received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, with an emphasis on both individual and family therapy. I was also a research associate on a long term study of the responses of adults and children to separation and divorce.

After my graduate training, I completed a two year postdoctoral fellowship in Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.

Since that time, I have been in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area