Helena Verdeli, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

Dr. Verdeli is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she has been teaching graduate psychology students on research and practice of empirically based treatments, specifically IPT and CBT with adolescents and adults. She is also an adjunct Assistant Professor at the New York State Psychiatric Institute where she has been teaching psychotherapy to psychiatric residents, postdoctoral fellows and psychology interns. 

Dr. Verdeli's research focuses on treatment and prevention of mood disorders through psychotherapy, and involves two areas. One is on use of Interpersonal Psychotherapy as a preventive intervention for symptomatic adolescents of Bipolar parents. For this work, she has received a NARSAD Young Investigator Award, a Sol Goldman Trust award and recently an NIMH Research's Career Development K23 Award. 

Dr. Verdeli's other area of research involves adapting and testing in randomized controlled trials psychotherapy for depressed people in developing countries. She collaborated with academic and humanitarian groups in the US and abroad and had a major role in the cultural modification of Interpersonal Psychotherapy for use with depressed men and women in resource-poor communities: depressed adults in South Uganda, depressed adolescents in refugee camps in North Uganda (many of whom were children soldiers) and distressed patients in primary care in Goa, India. 

Dr. Verdeli is a member of the Mental Health Advisory Committee for the Millennium Villages Project of the Earth Institute at Columbia University (directed by Jeffrey Sachs), and a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Scientific Advisory Board of DBSA.

Scientific Advisory Board