Dr Katherine Shear

M. Katherine Shear M.D. is the Marion E. Kenworthy Professor of Psychiatry and the founding Director of the Center for Prolonged Grief at Columbia University School of Social Work.

Dr. Shear is a clinical researcher whose research over the past 30 years has focused on the assessment and treatment of Prolonged Grief Disorder, which was instrumental in its recent inclusion as an official diagnosis in the ICD-11 and DSM-5. She developed and tested Complicated Grief Therapy/Prolonged Grief Disorder Therapy, a short-term, integrative psychotherapy that helps foster adaptation to loss.  She led a series of studies to confirm its efficacy in three large NIMH-funded studies.

The ongoing work of the Center for Prolonged Grief is to extend and promote the dissemination and implementation of this work and to inform the public of current work in the area.

Dr. Shear is widely recognized for her work in bereavement.  She has been awarded both research and clinical awards from the Association for Death Education and Counseling and invited authorship of articles for Uptodate and the New England Journal of Medicine. Her work includes more than 330 peer-reviewed publications. Among these are several widely used assessment instruments and a PGDT instruction manual.