Barbara is currently director of community program development with a multi-county safety net organization in upstate New York, where she also enjoys doing 1:1 trauma-specific treatment as a licensed mental health clinician. Prior to this, she was director of the Ithaca College Gerontology Institute, where her work focused on raising awareness and providing training in trauma-informed elder care, long-term care, and end of life care. She also worked with a multi-state clinical training team to adapt and teach evidence-based trauma-specific treatments that work at the bedside. Before that, Barbara was primarily an academic. She taught a range of lifespan developmental neuroscience courses at the undergraduate and graduate level at Cornell University and conducted research on stress and trauma as principal investigator/director of the Lifespan Affective Neuroscience MRI/fMRI laboratory there.
Barbara has published research and theory papers on the long-term effects of stress and trauma in Psychological Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, American Journal of Psychiatry, The Gerontologist, NeuroImage, Psychology and Aging, and the Journal of Traumatic Stress, and other peer-reviewed journals. Her scholarly work has been cited more than 2,500 times according to Google Scholar Citations. She is also first author on what may be the first-ever chapter on trauma-informed long-term care for a textbook to be published by Wiley and Sons.