Jennifer Shepard Payne, Ph.D., LCSW, is a Research Scientist and Clinician for the Kennedy Krieger Institute in the Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress (CCFTS) and the Center for the Neuroscience of Social Injustice. She is also an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, with a primary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. She also is the founder and owner of Direct To God Counseling and Consulting LLC: www.directtogod.com.
Dr. Payne received her doctorate from the UCLA School of Public Affairs and is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with many years of experience in mental health clinical practice and administration. Her research interests include developing culturally tailored community-based trauma interventions and addressing minority mental health disparities.
For several years, Dr. Payne has been working on culturally tailoring Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for African American communities experiencing racial trauma. Her groundbreaking work has led to the development of a culturally-tailored ACT intervention called POOF®, and she is now training and consulting on the model: www.POOF-PullingOutOfFire.com.
Additionally, she is a board member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS) and the North American Association of Christians in Social Work (NACSW).
EDUCATION AND HIGHLIGHTED AWARDS
B.A., University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - Department of Psychology
MSW, California State University, Long Beach - School of Social Work
Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles - Department of Social Welfare
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Inducted into the ACBS Fellows (https://contextualscience.org/acbs_fellows)
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Awardee of the Diana Garland Award for Practitioner Excellence, North American Association of Christians in Social Work (NACSW)
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National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) Health Disparities Research Institute Scholar
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Robert Woods Johnson Foundation New Connections Leadership Program awardee
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National Center for Institutional Diversity, Emerging Diversity Scholar
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Emerging Scholars Interdisciplinary Network Empirical Scholar, Program in Applied Multi-Ethnic Research, University of Michigan
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SAMHSA-funded Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) Minority Doctoral Fellow in Mental Health Leadership