Professor
BA, University of Wisconsin
MSW, University of Pennsylvania,School of Social Work
PhD, Rutgers University, School of Social Work
Before moving from Philadelphia to Berkeley in 1995, Dr. Coombs practiced as a clinical social worker in community mental health doing direct practice, administration, as well as supervising MSW students from the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College. She was on the faculty of Rutgers University, serving as the Graduate Field Work Director and Lecturer. She has been in independent practice since 1984. She completed a NIMH Post Doctoral Fellowship in mental health research at UC Berkeley from 1995-1997, where she focused on the role of emotion in psychotherapeutic change, and cross-cultural differences in psychological definitions of normal and abnormal development. She has been a Lecturer at the U.C. Berkeley School of Social Welfare teaching Family Therapy and Foundations of Social Work Practice since 1998. She is a member of the Berkeley Psychotherapy Research Group in the department of clinical psychology at UC Berkeley, where she is doing process-outcome research on differences in the handling of emotion in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, and Interpersonal Psychotherapy using the NIMH Treatment of Depression Collaborative Research Program data. She is on the Board of Directors of the Association of Family Therapists of Northern California, and the Bioenergetic Society of Northern California. She is a member of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration and the Society for Psychotherapy Research. Current interests include a focus on socialization of emotion in the family, and on the process by which therapists integrate different treatment modalities in effective practice.
