Elizabeth Brestan-Knight, PhD,
ELIZABETH BRESTAN-KNIGHT, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and an Associate Professor of Psychology at Auburn University, where she has an active faculty practice in addition to teaching graduate and undergraduate courses. For the past 18 years, she has worked in the direct provision of PCIT with families, training fellow therapists, and supervising students in PCIT. She has held two professorships at Auburn, won several awards for her teaching, and served as the department co-chair and undergraduate program director. Dr. Brestan-Knight has authored numerous chapters and articles as well as a book published by Wiley-Blackwell, A Guide to Teaching Developmental Psychology. She is the director of the Parent-Child Research Lab at Auburn where her research team evaluates PCIT training workshops, PCIT treatment fidelity, and implementation of the Dyadic Parent-Child Interaction Coding System.
Dr. Brestan-Knight received a Bachelor of Arts from Emory University and her doctorate in clinical and health psychology from the University of Florida. After completing an internship in pediatric psychology at the University of Miami's School of Medicine, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center on Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Most recently, Dr. Brestan-Knight has conducted projects focusing on the dissemination and implementation of PCIT to front-line mental health therapists in Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin. She maintains ties with these wonderful professionals and provides ongoing consultation to help them establish their own successful PCIT clinics with families around the globe. Dr. Brestan-Knight is a member of the American Psychological Association and The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.
