Suzanne Midori Hanna, Ph.D. is Co-Director for the Families and Traumatic Brain Injuries Project and for the Generic Skills Project at MRI. She began her professional career in 1977, with work at a hospital outpatient psychiatric center with adults and adolescents. Other clinical work has taken her to two marriage and family counseling clinics, a residential facility for adolescent boys, full-time private practice, mental health collaborations with medicine and home-based family therapy for those with Alzheimer’s Disease, HIV/AIDS and other chronic health conditions. Her current focus is upon consultation, training and research with non-profit agencies who wish to provide evidence-based family therapy approaches for underserved groups.

She is a former professor of Counseling and Family Sciences at Loma Linda University, associate professor and program director of the Family Therapy Program at the University of Louisville, instructor at Edgewood College, Madison, WI and is currently an instructor for Amridge University’s School of Human Services, an online university. She has published two books, The Practice of Family Therapy: Key Elements Across Models, fourth edition, and The Aging Family: New Visions in Theory, Practice and Reality, (with Terry Hargrave, senior editor), research articles on birth order, interpersonal communication, smoking cessation with African American women and various book chapters on family interventions and family therapy training.

Dr. Hanna’s personal model of intervention is an intersection of mind, body, spirit and relationships within developmental, strategic and narrative models of family therapy. She credits the influence of gender, race, culture, class, sibling position and Milton Erickson upon her own integrative model of family therapy. She received specialized training in couples therapy from the Marriage and Family Counseling Service in Rock Island, IL and has received training in three models of evidence-based family therapy from NIH-funded project teams. Dr. Hanna’s website is: http://web.mac.com/hannamft/MFT