White House Author

Kimberlyn Leary is a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow and serves as an Advisor to the White House Council on Women and Girls. Within the Council, Leary leads initiatives for diversity in STEM fields and empowerment for women and girls of color. Leary is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Chief Psychologist at the Cambridge Health Alliance, where her work is focused on delineating interpersonal exchanges that promote change and collaborative decision-making.   Prior to serving at the White House, Leary taught courses and seminars at the University of Michigan and at Harvard Medical School on negotiation, clinical technique and on public policy and mental health. In 2009, Leary received an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, attending on a Public Services Fellowship. Leary’s major areas of teaching, clinical activity, and research are directed at enhancing effective clinical practice in psychotherapy and in negotiation and mediation. Her 1997 paper on race and self-disclosure won the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Karl Menninger Prize. Leary sits on the editorial boards of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Psychoanalytic Psychology, the Harvard Mental Health Letter and the Harvard Negotiation Journal.