About Academic Career Coach

I first began working with people in academia as a post-doc at the University of Michigan Psychological Clinic, where in addition to providing therapy, I led dissertation skills workshops each semester. I found that the tools I had developed while writing my own dissertation were helpful to many graduate students. At the same time, in my private psychotherapy practice, I began working with faculty members who were facing challenges on the tenure track. I discovered common threads among the problems junior professors faced and found collaborative techniques for easing these problems. As the faculty I worked with made progress, published successfully and achieved tenure, I developed the core principals of Successful Academic Career Coaching.

In 2001, I moved with my family from Ann Arbor, MI to Chapel Hill, NC and I created my website, SuccessfulAcademic.com. Soon I began working with professors from all over the U.S. and even some international countries. My academic career coaching skills helped people with goal setting, time management and habit formation. My therapy skills helped people understand how their past, and their patterns of thinking, got in their way. Combining academic career coaching support with psychological insight helped people get unstuck and move forward. 

As I found ways to balance my own career with raising a family, I became even more committed to helping professors, especially women, balance of the demands of work and children. To this day, I try to help all academics find the best balance of research, teaching, service and the rest of life.

During my career, I’ve worked with adjunct professors, junior faculty, full professors and deans. I’ve become familiar with developmental hurdles typical during each phase. Over the years, I’ve also heard about many atypical situations and I’ve helped several faculty members extricate themselves from harmful career politics and personal crises. Unfortunately, dysfunctional departments are all too common!