Faculty
Mary Beth Connolly Gibbons, PhD (Director)
gibbonsm@pennmedicine.upenn.edu
(215) 662-3488
Mary Beth Connolly Gibbons received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Vanderbilt University in 1996 and has been on the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine since that time. She is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry and the current Director of the Center for Psychotherapy Research. She is an author on over 100 journal articles and book chapters. She received the Early Career Award from the International Society for Psychotherapy Research in 2002. She conducts studies of the effectiveness and mechanisms of evidence-based psychotherapies in real world community settings as well as studies of measurement-based care systems to optimize the implementation and effectiveness of psychotherapies in these settings. Complimenting her research program, Dr. Gibbons is also involved in training psychiatry residents in models of time-limited, relationship-focused psychotherapy.
Paul F. Crits-Christoph, PhD
crits@pennmedicine.upenn.edu
(215) 662-7993
Paul Crits-Christoph received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976 and his PhD in Psychology (Clinical) from Yale University in 1984. He has been on the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania since completing his doctoral degree. He is now an Emeritus Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry and the past director of the Center for Psychotherapy Research at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an author of over 230 journal articles, over 60 book chapters, and 5 books on topics related to research on the process and outcome of Psychotherapy. After receiving the Early Career Award (1992) from the International Society for Psychotherapy Research, he subsequently served (1996) as president of the Society. He has received the Distinguished Research Career Award from the Society for Psychotherapy Research in 2016 and the Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology Award from Division 12 (Society of Clinical Psychology) of the American Psychological Association in 2020. His primary interests are in the process and outcome of psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral treatments for anxiety, affective and personality disorders, psychosocial treatments for substance use disorders, and methodological and statistical issues in treatment research. More recently he has been focusing on research on treatments for depression and substance use disorders in community settings.
Joel E. Streim, MD
joel.streim@pennmedicine.upenn.edu
Joel E. Streim, M.D. is a geriatric psychiatrist and Professor of Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directed the Geriatric Psychiatry Fellowship Training Program from 1994 to 2020. During those years, he also directed geriatric psychiatry training at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center; and served as a research investigator in the VA VISN 4 Mental Illness Research Education and Clinical Center from 1999 to 2010.
Dr. Streim’s research, teaching and clinical efforts reflect his longstanding career interest in the problems of elderly patients with medical and psychiatric co-morbidity, and physical and cognitive disability, with an emphasis on mental health care in primary care and long-term care settings. He has conducted federally funded research on treatment of depression in medically ill nursing home patients, and clinical trials of treatments for cognitive impairment, psychosis, and behavioral disturbances in older adults with dementia. He had a leading role in revising, field testing, and validating the Mood and Behavior sections of the Minimum Data Set (MDS 3.0), a key component of the standardized Resident Assessment Instrument that is mandated for use in all 16,000 U.S. nursing homes that receive Medicare or Medicaid funds. He has also served as a consultant to RAND on the development of uniform cognitive measures for use in post-acute care settings and has collaborated on the development and applications of a novel staging system to measure population-level disability in elderly Medicare beneficiaries.
Currently, Dr. Streim is the Medical Director of a statewide collaborative care program, funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Aging, which supports the provision of mental health services to older adults within primary care practices. An expert in mental health care policy for older adults, Dr. Streim has served as a consultant to the National Quality Forum (NQF), the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQF), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) on quality of mental health care for older adults; and he has testified before Congress on issues related to geriatric mental health. He has also served in an advisory role to the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Dr. Streim received his MD degree from the University of Rochester School of Medicine. After completing a residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester and a residency in psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, he did clinical and research fellowships in geriatric psychiatry at the VA Medical Center in Madison, Wisconsin. He has lectured and published extensively on topics in geriatric psychiatry and is nationally recognized as a leader in the field. He is a Past President of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry.
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