In February, Clarkson University President Marc P. Christensen, Ph.D., P.E. announced that Elizabeth Pienkos has been granted tenure and promoted from assistant professor to associate professor of psychology in the School of Arts & Sciences.
She received her bachelor’s degree (summa cum laude) in French studies from Rice University and her Psy.D. in clinical psychology from Rutgers University.
Pienkos’s research focuses primarily on the phenomenology of schizophrenia. She is concerned with developing a rich understanding of what it is like to experience schizophrenia and similar psychiatric conditions. She developed the Examination of Anomalous World Experience (EAWE), a phenomenological interview that focuses on a number of subtle changes in schizophrenia, such as disturbances in perceptual salience, unusual feelings of familiarity, and experiences of solipsistic centrality (feeling like the creator or origin of the world).
Pienkos’s empirical research has included a number of qualitative studies, including an investigation of world experience in chronic schizophrenia, explorations of the nature of self and world experience in schizophrenia and depersonalization disorder, and consideration of changes in the lived world that are associated with hallucinatory experiences. This work helps to broaden our understanding of schizophrenia and associated symptoms like hallucinations, providing insight into factors related to the etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of this and other psychiatric disorders.
She is the recipient of the 2014 Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry Karl Jaspers Award and the 2018 Teaching Award at the Graduate Institute of Professional Psychology (University of Hartford). In 2019, she received funding from the Walker Fellowship Program to explore experiences of mental health and mental healthcare in St. Lawrence County. She also received the 2016 and 2017 Dean’s Research Funds grant from the University of Hartford, and the 2014 National Psychologist Trainee Register Credentialing Scholarship. In graduate school, she was awarded the 2014 APA Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) Graduate Scholars Award and the 2009 Scholar’s Award from the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University.
She has published numerous scholarly articles and other publications. She has also offered international workshops training clinicians and scholars to use the EAWE interview, and she has been an invited speaker for training programs in psychiatry and clinical psychology. In 2022 she gave a keynote address to the annual conference for the Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists, and she was recently invited to give a keynote address in May in Ghent, Belgium, at the Too Mad To Be True conference, hosted by the Dutch Psychiatry and Philosophy Foundation.
She is a member of the American Psychological Association; APA Division 5, Quantitative and Qualitative Methods; APA Division 24, the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology; the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology; the Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists; the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry; and the National Register of Psychologists.
Before coming to Clarkson in 2018, Pienkos was an assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of Professional Psychology at the University of Hartford, where she taught courses in clinical psychology. Prior to that, she worked as a clinical psychologist for the Nova Scotia Health Authority at Cole Harbour Community Mental Health and the Recovery and Integration program. She is a licensed psychologist in the state of New York and has a small private practice in the local community.