THE AUSTEN RIGGS CENTER - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Communications Officer
- Communications Officer / Education
Aaron M. Beatty is the communications officer at the Austen Riggs Center where he writes and edits content, analyzes data trends, and helps to develop and maintain editorial and brand standards. In addition, he is responsible for several project management, public relations, and outreach initiatives.
Prior to Riggs, Mr. Beatty was a stay-at-home parent to two children, which provided a crash course in early childhood development. Before that, he was the creative coordinator at KB Toys (Pittsfield, MA) focused on copywriting, graphic design, and project management. He was also a peer trainer at the Alcoholism Council of Tompkins County (Ithaca, NY), working with middle and high school students.
Mr. Beatty has served on the boards of the Becket Athenaeum, Berkshire Writers Room, and Word Street, and was a member of the Historical Commission in Becket (where he and his family currently live) for a number of years. He enjoys writing poetry, reading, running, skiing, live music, and spending time with his family.
Job Titles:
- IT Project Manager
- PMP, Is the IT Project Manager
Alexcia Adams, PMP, is the IT project manager at the Austen Riggs Center.
Job Titles:
- Associate Clinical Professor, Yale Child Study Center
André Zandoná, LICSW, is a clinical social worker at the Austen Riggs Center.
Job Titles:
- President / CEO of Reliable Silver Corporation
Job Titles:
- Clinical Social Worker
- Clinical Social Worker / Education
Beth Turner, LICSW, is a clinical social worker at the Austen Riggs Center.
Ms. Turner has 20 years of experience in clinical social work and has practiced and supervised in inpatient and residential settings, crisis teams, consultative-liaison psychiatry, and in private practice with individuals and couples. She has also presented and taught on Control Mastery theory and family therapy.
Carol Bersaw, RN, is a staff nurse at the Austen Riggs Center.
Job Titles:
- Director of Clinical Social Work / Education
Cathleen M. Morey, PhD, LICSW, is the director of clinical social work at the Austen Riggs Center. She provides direct patient care, family consultation and family therapy, clinical supervision, education and training, case consultation, and administrative management of clinical social work staff.
Dr. Morey has previous clinical social work experience working in a wide range of mental health settings, including an inpatient psychiatric hospital, a correctional facility and community mental health settings.
Dr. Morey has been a volunteer with International Social Work Solutions for several years. ISWS has sponsored Dr. Morey to participate in several social work projects with international partner organizations. She has developed and presented a 2-day virtual Trauma Training Program for staff of a humanitarian NGO in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She has also partnered with a NYC non-profit agency to provide research consultation regarding data analysis of their work with under-resourced diabetic adults living in Uganda.
Professional Affiliations
American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work
National Association of Social Workers
American Family Therapy Academy
The International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis
Job Titles:
- Chief Financial Officer
- Chief Operating Officer
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Chief Operating Officer / Chief Financial Officer / Education
Chauncey Collins, MBA, started at the Austen Riggs Center in 1980 and has spent three decades working in various roles.
Job Titles:
- Medical Records Administrator
Job Titles:
- Director of Training / Staff Psychologist / Grand Rounds Coordinator / Education
Daniel Knauss, PsyD, ABPP, is the director of training and a staff psychologist at the Austen Riggs Center. Dr. Knauss also coordinates the Grand Rounds at Austen Riggs.
Dr. Knauss has worked clinically in a variety of settings including private practice, community mental health, university counseling centers, medical centers, and residential treatment settings.
Dr. Knauss is an active presenter at national and international conferences and has published in peer-reviewed journals. He currently serves on the Editorial Board for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and is vice-chair of the Austen Riggs Center Institutional Review Board. Dr. Knauss has a passion for education, having taught undergraduate and graduate level psychology courses at private and public universities and has experience providing clinical supervision to psychology graduate students.
Job Titles:
- Director of Information Technology
- Member of the Leadership Team
Dave Belliveau is the director of information technology at the Austen Riggs Center. He is an accomplished information technology (IT) leader with more than 20 years of experience focused on organizational health and senior executive advising, and has held leadership positions at Fortune 500 and startup companies such as GE and Wave Systems Corp. Using a cross-functional and international approach, he helps current and future leaders align their business and technology strategies and leverage opportunities.
Mr. Belliveau holds a bachelor's degree in computer science, a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification from ISC2, and has earned a Certified Chief Information Security Officer (C|CISO) designation by the EC-Council.
Job Titles:
- Director of Dietary / Executive Chef
David Jordan provides oversight of and direction for all dietary/food needs for patients and staff at the Center.
Job Titles:
- Director of Psychiatric Education / Associate Director of Training / Team Leader / Education / MD from University of Miami School of Medicine
David Mintz, MD, is a staff psychiatrist who joined the Austen Riggs Center in 1996. He presently serves as the director of psychiatric education, the associate director of training, and as a team leader. He also is principal investigator for the research initiative in Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology and author of the book Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology: Caring for the Treatment-Resistant Patient (2022, American Psychiatric Association Publishing). Dr. Mintz also coordinates the Elective in Psychodynamic Psychiatry at the Austen Riggs Center.
David Reiss, MD, is a distinguished faculty member in the Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy of the Austen Riggs Center.
Dr. Reiss was the Director of the Division of Research and the Center for Family Research at George Washington University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., as well as Vivian Gill Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences there. He has published many articles and books investigating the relationship between genetic and psychosocial factors and forming testable models of behavioral development across the life span. Also trained in psychoanalysis, he has been committed to postdoctoral research training in psychiatry and the behavioral sciences.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Social Worker
- Clinical Social Worker / Education
David Rosenthal, LICSW, is a clinical social worker at the Austen Riggs Center. He provides direct patient care, family consultation, and family therapy.
Mr. Rosenthal has 28 years of clinical social work experience working at Bennington College, the Brien Center, and most recently at Berkshire Medical Center.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Director of the Therapeutic Community
- Director of Therapeutic Community Program / Education
Donna Elmendorf, PhD, is the director of the Therapeutic Community Program and the Activities Program at the Austen Riggs Center. Dr. Elmendorf also serves as a psychotherapist and a psychotherapy supervisor in the Center's Adult Psychoanalytic Training Program and Fellowship in Hospital-Based Psychotherapy. She provides group consultation and supervision and leads the Center's consultation service. She also leads the Human Development Initiative, bringing developmentally informed, relationship-based interventions to our local Berkshire community.
Dr. Elmendorf's work as an organizational and group relations consultant supports her efforts to better understand the social dynamics of psychological disturbance within the Therapeutic Community at Austen Riggs. Prior to coming to Riggs, her experience at the Adolescent and Family Treatment Center at McLean Hospital as well as her work at the counseling center at Bard College at Simon's Rock deepened her understanding of the developmental transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Dr. Elmendorf is actively involved in the Berkshire community, having served on the board of several local and state organizations involved with mental health, education, and environmental conservation. She is working with several colleagues to develop an understanding of how tuning into emotional experience and sharing such experience in relation to the task of a group or organization is an often overlooked and underappreciated aspect of leadership.
Job Titles:
- Nursing Department Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Researcher, and Organizational Consultant
Job Titles:
- Clinical Social Worker
- Clinical Social Worker / Education
- Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Academy
Elizabeth Slowinski, LICSW, is a clinical social worker at the Austen Riggs Center.
Ms. Slowinski has worked for more than a decade with the emerging adult population, domestically and abroad, and comes to Austen Riggs via Baystate Franklin Medical Center and the Brattleboro Retreat.
Ms. Slowinski is the vice chair of the Board of Trustees for The Academy at Charlemont.
Dr. Plakun was the director of admissions for 35 years and has dedicated nearly his entire professional career to Riggs (more than 40 years) and its unique way of looking at and treating mental disorders. Other roles have included treatment team leader, psychotherapy supervisor, and co-principal investigator of a prospective, longitudinal study of treatment outcome.
Job Titles:
- Psychiatrist
- Online IOP Psychiatrist / Education / MD from the University of Maryland Medical School
Erin Seery, MD, is a psychiatrist in the Online Intensive Outpatient Program for College Students and Emerging Adults in Massachusetts at the Austen Riggs Center. Dr. Seery serves as the psychiatry consultant within the IOP, but also intermittently provides psychotherapy and group therapy. She is a board-certified psychiatrist with active medical licenses in Massachusetts, New York, and South Carolina. She is committed to understanding patients across the lifespan and the unique challenges at particular developmental timepoints. She completed general psychiatry residency and a geriatric psychiatry fellowship at the Medical University of South Carolina, and then pursued a 4-year advanced psychoanalytic fellowship at the Austen Riggs Center residential program where she worked with emerging adults and those in other life stages in intensive psychodynamic individual psychotherapy, group and family therapy modalities and in concert with psychiatric prescribing.
Following her psychoanalytic fellowship, Dr. Seery joined the faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina. She practices in a variety of settings from the adult and child psychiatric emergency rooms to supervising the outpatient senior resident clinic.She serves as the Associate Program Director and Associate Psychotherapy Director of the general psychiatry residency program. She has received numerous awards for her teaching of psychiatry trainees.
Dr. Seery is also involved in advocacy, recently named a Trustee with the American Academy of Psychodynamic Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (AAPDPP) (2023-2026) and will be the incoming president of the South Carolina Psychiatric Association (2024-2025). She writes and presents on topics of Personality Based prescribing, psychotherapeutic interventions in acute settings, the use of countertransference in inpatient settings, and psychodynamic considerations of brain stimulation.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Associate in Psychiatry
- Director of the Erikson Institute for Education
- Education and Research Assistant
Jane G. Tillman, PhD
Evelyn Stefansson Nef Director of the Erikson Institute for Education and Research Assistant Clinical Professor, Yale Child Study Center; Teaching Associate in Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance of Harvard Medical School
Job Titles:
- Associate Director of the Therapeutic Community Program
- Certified Group Relations Consultant With the AK Rice Institute
- Director of Health and Wellness / Associate Director of the Therapeutic Community Program / Education
Heather Churchill, PhD, is the associate director of the Therapeutic Community Program, the director of health and wellness, and a staff psychologist who provides psychotherapy and psychological testing at the Austen Riggs Center.
During her graduate training, she was a teaching assistant for several classes, including History and Systems of Psychology, as well as Cognitive and Projective Assessment. Also during her graduate training, she completed the New York Society Fellowship program, as well as the Couple and Family Fellowship program at the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. During her internship at Utah State Hospital, she received intensive training in dialectical behavioral therapy and provided individual, group, and family therapy, as well as psychological assessments.
Churchill is a certified group relations consultant with the AK Rice Institute and former president of the Center for the Study of Groups and Social Systems, a non-profit whose mission is to further the understanding of groups dynamics and social systems.
Job Titles:
- Founder of Ansible Health
Job Titles:
- Director of the Erikson Institute for Education
Jane G. Tillman, PhD
Evelyn Stefansson Nef Director of the Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy; Assistant Clinical Professor, Yale Child Study Center; Teaching Associate in Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance of Harvard Medical School
Job Titles:
- Director of Human Resources
- Member of the Leadership Team
Job Titles:
- Retired Vice - President at Bennington College
Job Titles:
- Staff Psychiatrist / Substance Use Services Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Physician - in - Chief, Hartford HealthCare Behavioral Health Network Senior Vice President, Hartford HealthCare
Job Titles:
- Member of the Austen Riggs Board of Trustees
- Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Amherst College
Job Titles:
- Director of Communications
Job Titles:
- Assistant Clinical Professor at Yale School of Medicine Chair of the Council on Advocacy and Government Relations for the American Psychiatric Association
Job Titles:
- Executive Vice President, Urban Institute / Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School / McLean Hospital
Job Titles:
- Lawyer at Goulston & Storrs
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Austen Riggs Board of Trustees
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Director of Psychopharmacology / Staff Psychiatrist
Job Titles:
- Director of Finance
- Member of the Leadership Team
Job Titles:
- Visiting Professor, Rutgers Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Director of Medical Services
Job Titles:
- Clinical Psychologist, Co
Clinical Psychologist, Co-Chair: Coalition of Clinician Survivors
Job Titles:
- Advisor / Consultant to Innovative Healthcare Companies
Job Titles:
- Associate Medical Director
- Director of Admissions
- Member of the Leadership Team
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Director of Online IOP
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Accreditation Manager / Team Leader / Chair of the Austen Riggs Institutional Review Board / Staff Psychologist