Rebecca Shiner is Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Colgate University, where she has taught since 1999. She received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1998 and completed her clinical internship at the University of Rochester Department of Psychiatry in 1999. She has published widely on multiple topics relevant to grief: coping with trauma and stress; life narratives and their role in making meaning out of suffering; regulation of negative emotions; managing uncertainty; and resilience. She is currently completing a study on post-traumatic growth and life narratives in bereaved parents. She was included in Princeton Review’s Best 300 Professors and teaches courses at Colgate on therapy, psychological disorders, happiness, and resilience in the face of suffering and adversity. She has recorded an audiobook, How to Find the Right Therapy: Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Family Counseling, and Other Treatments That Work. Most important for this presentation, she is a bereaved parent herself; her young adult son Leo died by suicide in 2022. She hopes to offer insights from her scholarly expertise, her own experiences, and her work with other bereaved parents to help others best support parents who have experienced the loss of an adult child.
