After years of being the unofficial sleep consultant to friends, colleagues and family with a variety of child and adult sleep issues, I decided to make the leap and create NYC Sleep Doctor. I strongly believe that correcting sleep problems—for children and for adults—is critical to the physical and psychological health of the whole family.

I was born and raised in the Midwest and moved to New York City to attend college. After graduating from New York University with honors in Psychology, I received the prestigious Henry Mitchell MacCracken fellowship for graduate study at NYU. I conducted research in conflict resolution among couples and received intensive clinical training in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Family Systems Therapy. While at NYU, I trained at Kings County Medical Center, Bellevue Hospital, New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Eating Disorders Resource Center. I completed my internship training at the Manhattan Veterans Administration Medical Center in 2001-2002. I graduated from NYU in 2002 with a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and my dissertation research was published that year in the Journal of Personality.

After my internship at the Manhattan VA, I was hired there as a Health Psychologist working in the Primary Care Medical Clinic. There was great concern at the time about the overuse of hypnotic sleep medications such as Ambien in the veteran population. I found a suitable treatment protocol in the literature and adapted it, creating the Sleep Disorders Treatment Program at the Manhattan and Brooklyn VA Hospitals. In 2006, I was named Assistant Director of Outpatient Mental Health and placed in charge of developing new treatment programs in the outpatient clinic. That year, I was also appointed Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU Medical School, Department of Psychiatry.

While developing the sleep program, I also started a family and read all the sleep manuals I could find. I was struck by how confusing these books could be and found myself interpreting them for my friends and fellow moms.

I soon noticed a division of labor in couples—there always seemed to be a “reader” who had to convince the other parent to follow techniques, ones that could be counterintuitive and challenging. Yet getting a child to sleep well requires a team effort. I devised step-by-step plans to address the problems and found that this approach was very effective. I discovered maxims, and with them as a foundation, I devised tailored sleep plans for each family.

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