Clara Engelina Gerhardt Samford University, Birmingham, AL, USA

Clara Gerhardt, MBA, PhD. is a licensed Clinical Psychologist and a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. She received extensive international training as a systemic family therapist.  From the early eighties onward, she sat in the front rows as the great family therapy movement was unfolding. She attended workshops by many of the pioneers in the field, a veritable Who’s Who of family therapy that is slowly receding into history as these pioneers are passing on. This provided her with a unique and personal perspective of the early and by now historic days of family therapy.

Her many publications include Parent-Child Relations: An Introduction to Parenting (2019), now in its 10th edition. She contributed a number of entries to the Encyclopedia of Family Studies (2016). She is contributing editor to a publication of the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) and writes a regular column Perspectives. She published over a hundred articles related to popular psychology. Her academic home is at Samford University, where she is professor and past chair in Human Development and Family Science. Her favorite courses to teach are Counseling Foundations, Parenting and Multicultural Perspectives.

Dr. G. - as her students call her - has presented at about 200 conferences on six continents.  She is the product of three continents and speaks five languages fluently. She is exceptionally well travelled, but the best journeys are those leading home to her family.