The Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology

Overview:

The Stony Brook Ph.D. program in Clinical Psychology began in 1966, and it is APA accredited (Committee on Accreditation, American Psychological Association, 750 First Street, NE, Washington, DC 20002-4242, Phone: 202-336-5979). Based on chair rankings in US News and World Report, it has been ranked among the top 10-20 clinical programs in the United States across the past decade. Using the empirical index of citation impact, Stony Brook faculty ranked 13^th in the nation (Mattson et al., 2005) and Stony Brook graduates rank 2^nd in the nation in terms of total number of publications (Roy et al., 2006, Journal of Clinical Psychology). The clinical program was among the first in the country to espouse the behavioral tradition in clinical psychology. Currently, the program retains its behavioral roots, but has evolved to encompass a broader set of perspectives that are oriented around an empirical approach to clinical psychology. Our goal is to graduate clinical scientists who approach psychological problems from an empirical perspective and who are also skilled clinicians. As such, students receive research and clinical training in a broad range of approaches. Our program is most suited to students who are interested in pursuing academic and research-related careers.

Faculty:

Faculty members are nationally and internationally recognized scholars who hold numerous honors and awards for their research, teaching, and service to the field. The majority of the core and affiliated faculty have active grant funding and many of their PhD students have received pre-doctoral research grants, such as NRSAs. Many of the core faculty serve or have served as Editors or Associate Editors of major peer-reviewed journals in the field, including Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, and Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The research interests of the core faculty center on depressive disorders, discord and aggression among couples, romantic competence among adolescents and adults, social problem solving, prevention and treatment of children’s conduct problems and dysfunctional parental discipline, psychotherapy process and outcome, lesbian/gay/bisexual issues, autism, and literacy enhancement.

For a listing of current faculty and their research interests, please click here.

Research and Clinical Facilities:

           Departmental: Faculty maintain active laboratories for research and graduate training (see individual faculty pages for further description). Clinical facilities include the Psychological Center, a training, research, and service unit that provides psychological services and consultation to the community; the department-sponsored University Pre-School that enrolls children from 18 months to five years of age, permitting both research and observation; the University Marital Therapy Clinic that provides consultation, assessment, and therapy for couples and individuals in the community who are experiencing relationship difficulties and provides a center for research evaluation of couples.

           Campus: The University Counseling Center, which serves the Stony Brook student population, offers a psychodynamic seminar for graduate students and the opportunity to see individual clients on a short-term basis. The University Wo/Men’s Center, where graduate students can participate in an externship, provides individual, couple, and group counseling on a variety of issues relevant to men and women. Collaborative relationships exist with the Department of Psychiatry, where students can engage in research and clinical activities related to, among other topics, childhood and adolescent disorders and health psychology, and with the Department of Neurology, where students can engage in research and clinical activities related to neuropsychology.

           Off-campus: Affiliations have been established with North Shore-Long Island Jewish Hospital, the Developmental Disabilities Institute, Child and Family Psychological Services, the Victim’s Information Bureau of Suffolk (VIBS), Head Start, numerous local public schools, and other local mental health agencies and hospitals. Each of these sites provides opportunities for clinical externships and research collaboration.

Program requirements:

Official program requirements are detailed in our Program Requirements Guide. More generally, the program is designed to provide students with competencies in research, clinical work, and teaching through coursework, clinical supervision, and research mentoring. Students follow a program of coursework through their first 3 to 4 years in the program that includes courses pertaining to the foundations of clinical psychology (e.g., psychopathology, assessment, and intervention), research methods and statistics, and ethics. Students are also required to take courses in the other areas of psychology (biopsychology, cognitive/experimental, developmental, and social/health) in order to increase breadth of training. Students become actively involved in a research lab upon arrival in the program and are required to complete two projects by the end of their third year in order to advance to candidacy, which is followed by the doctoral dissertation. Clinical training, under the supervision of area faculty, begins in the first year of the program in our Psychological Center and can continue until the internship year. Prior to internship, many students choose to complete externships at local agencies and hospitals in addition to their training in the Psychological Center. Throughout the program, students often work as teaching assistants and are required to complete at least two semesters of substantial direct instruction of undergraduates, which involves lecturing in undergraduate classes. For the period, 2001-2006, the average time to completion of the program was 6.9 years, including the internship year (range of time from entry to completion of Ph.D was 4.3 to 11.3 (the latter included medical leave times for several students). For more information on characteristics of accepted applicants and time to completion see Full Disclosure Data for clinical program on this website.

Admission to the program:

The program received between 217 and 335 applications between 2001 and 2007 and, over the past 7 years, had an entering class of 5 to 8 students. Successful applicants to the program are bright, socially skilled students with strong research backgrounds, who have interests compatible with those of core clinical faculty, and who are interested in pursuing academic/research careers. The average GPA of the last seven entering classes (2001-2007) was 3.70, and their average GRE scores were V 634, Q 703, and A 715. As of Fall 2007, 44 students were enrolled in the program. Approximately 81% (n=38) of those students are female and 7% (n=3) are under-represented minorities.

Placement:

The Clinical Program has an outstanding placement record.  In the period from 1999-2006)  64% of graduates took academic or research positions in universities, colleges, medical schools, and research institutes. In a recent study examining which clinical psychology programs have trained the most faculty in other doctoral programs across the country, Stony Brook ranked second across the past 30 years (Ilardi et al., Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 2000). Over the past 10 years, Stony Brook has trained more faculty members in APA-accredited clinical psychology doctoral programs than any other program in North America or Europe.