Karestan C Koenen

Karestan Chase Koenen (born June 23, 1968) is an American epidemiologist and Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also the head of the Global Neuropsychiatric Genomics Initiative of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute. She is a fellow of the American Psychopathological Association and a former president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. In 2015, she received the Robert S. Laufer, PhD, Memorial Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Publications Treating Survivors of Childhood Abuse and Interpersonal Trauma, the revised and updated version she co-authored, was published in June 2020

Education

In 1990, Koenen received a B.A. in Economics from Wellesley College. After completing her undergraduate degree, she went on to get an M.A. in Development Psychology from Columbia University. She was awarded her Ph.D in Clinical Psychology in 1999 at Boston University , with her thesis titled The comorbidity of posttraumatic stress disorder and antisocial personality disorder: An epidemiological and genetic study. In 2002 she completed her Post-doctoral Fellowship in Psychiatric Epidemiology at Columbia university. . After her own assault in Niger while serving with the Peace Corps, Koenen began a career researching PTSD and trauma with the goal of helping other women who had been assaulted.