Biographies

Dr. Edna B. Foa
Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry
University of Pennsylvania

Edna B. Foa, Ph.D. is a Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety. She received her B.A. in Psychology and Literature from Bar Ilan University, Israel, and her Ph.D., in Clinical Psychology and Personality, from University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1970. Dr. Foa devoted her academic career to study the psychopathology and treatment of anxiety disorders, primarily obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and social phobia and is currently one of the world leading experts in these areas.

Dr. Foa‘s research on therapy outcome with OCD, described in numerous publications has been influential both in Clinical Psychology and in Psychiatry. Among psychologists, it has helped establish Exposure and Response Prevention as the treatment of choice for OCD while fostering the awareness that certain drugs are helpful, and sometime necessary. Among psychiatrists it promoted the realization that psychosocial treatments can be at least as effective as medication. Her role in the field was recognized by her appointment as Chair of the DSM-IV Subcommittee for OCD. The influence of her research is reflected in the fact that Experts Treatment Guidelines for OCD recommended Exposure combined with Response Prevention as the treatment of choice for OCD.

As with her work in OCD, Dr. Foa has been a world renowned leader in the area of reactions to trauma, natural recovery, and treatment of chronic trauma-related psychopathology. Here too she has been developing a short-term cognitive behavior therapy program for PTSD, called Prolonged Exposure (PE), and conducted empirical studies to evaluate its efficacy. The results of these studies have influenced the field to such an extent that Prolonged Exposure is considered by many experts to be the treatment of choice for PTSD. As a result, many researchers and clinicians have adopted this treatment in their work with various trauma victims. Again, this research has been disseminated in numerous journal articles, book chapters, and many lectures and workshops, both in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Foa co-chaired the DSM-IV Subcommittee for PTSD, and more recently, she chaired the Taskforce for Treatment Guidelines for PTSD of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

In the past few years, the numbers of individuals suffering from PTSD increased dramatically in the U.S. and around the world as a result of increased terror attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This increase resulted in resulted in urgent need to disseminate Prolonged Exposure to mental health professionals. In response to this need, Dr. Foa devoted a lot of her time to disseminating PE among therapists who treat patients with PTSD. In particular, she has trained hundreds of mental health professionals in the VAH to conduct Prolonged Exposure and trained VAH trainers further disseminate PE in that system. Dr. Foa has initiated a similar program in the Army.

As a complement to her interest in developing effective treatments for pathological anxiety, Dr. Foa has been continuously concerned about understanding the processes that make the treatment work. In this endeavor, she was first influenced by conditioning theory and later on by the conceptual framework of information processing. In addition to her research on outcome and processes of treatment, Dr. Foa has been investigating the mechanisms underlying pathological anxiety. Dr. Foa’s interest in the psychopathology of anxiety and its treatment has produced a number of theoretical papers that have received much attention and have become classics in the field.

Dr. Foa has published several books and over 350 articles and book chapters and has lectured extensively around the world. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards and honors. Among them are: Distinguished Professor Award under the Fulbright Program for International Exchange of Scholars; Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Psychological Association, Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology; First Annual Outstanding Research Contribution Award presented by the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy; Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association; Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies; and the 2006 Senior Scholar Fulbright Award; an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel in Switzerland, and 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the Association for Behavior and Cognitive Therapies.