Biography

Laura Dietz has been a faculty member in SHRS since 2019 and teaches our graduate students and supervises internship students.  Dietz also works with students in conducting psychological evaluations for the Public Safety Department at UPMC. Her passion for teaching comes from her own love of learning and experience as a first-generation college student. She loves to teach students the theory and research that goes into being a mental health professional and evidence-based strategies to become excellent licensed professional mental health counselors. 

For the past 15 years, Dietz has developed, manualized and tested the efficacy and putative treatment mechanisms of Family Based Interpersonal Psychotherapy (FB-IPT) for Depressed Preadolescents. She trains clinicians in Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depressed Adolescents (IPT-A) and FB-IPT, both nationally and internationally. She is the primary investigator on two pilot studies, one that seeks to train religious leaders/health paraprofessionals in communities of color to deliver evidence-based bereavement counseling and one that seeks to train and establish family navigators to help kinship caregivers in rural communities’ access mental health and resources for the dependent children in their care.