Katherine Shear, MD

M. Katherine Shear M.D. is Marion E. Kenworthy Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University School of Social Work. She graduated with Honors from the University of Chicago and attended medical school at Tufts University. She completed a medical residency and fellowship in infectious diseases and is Board Certified in internal medicine. After completing a residency in psychiatry at Payne Whitney Clinic, Cornell University Department of Psychiatry, and a fellowship in psychosomatic medicine at Montefiore Hospital, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, she joined the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Cornell. She established the Department's first clinical research program in Anxiety Disorders, and obtained research grants to study in panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, before moving to the University of Pittsburgh. There, she served as Professor of Psychiatry until January, 2006. She continued her research has been in anxiety disorders, including comorbid anxiety and depression, with a primary focus on psychotherapy studies. Her recent research is in the area of bereavement and grief. This work resulted in completion of the first randomized controlled treatment study targeting the condition of complicated grief, showing efficacy of a modified form of interpersonal psychotherapy.

She is author or co-author of more than 200 publications and a frequent presenter at national and international meetings. She has served as co-chair of the American Psychiatric Association Treatment Guidelines for Panic Disorder, as Chair of the Annual meeting of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, and President of the Association for Clinical Psychosocial Research. She is a frequent consultant to national and international groups interested in bereavement and grief. She has developed assessment instruments, including the Panic Disorder Severity Scale, the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Severity Scale, an instrument to assess adult separation anxiety disorder and several new grief assessment measures. She has served as a member of the Italy-based Spectrum Advisory Board (www.spectrum-project.org) that developed a novel to assessment of a range of clinical features associated with different DSM IV disorders.