Northcentral University

3 Emily Schmittel, PhD, LMFT Associate Director of Doctoral Clinical Training Department of Marriage and Family Sciences Dr. Schmittel joined the MFT clinical team in January 2022 as the Associate Director of Doctoral Clinical Training. Over the last few years she has taught doctoral internship courses in both the PhD and DMFT programs. She was drawn to the Associate Director position after she was inspired by doctoral students' meaningful work in their communities. Additionally, she was impressed with how doctoral students persevered in their professional goals not only during a pandemic, but also on top of many other stressors and family responsibilities. Her journey in becoming a family therapist started when she had an internship with the Missouri Children's Division during her BA. As a caseworker intern, she saw that the most meaningful change with families occurred with their family therapists. During her MA and PhD programs in MFT, she went on to provide therapy to families involved in the child welfare system working towards reunification. She learned from this experience how painful it is for families to be separated in this system and how much stigma exists towards biological parents working towards having their children returned to their care. Additionally, she saw the role of transgenerational trauma in families who had multiple generations of child welfare involvement. As a result, her dissertation focused on exploring how child welfare involved mothers' trauma symptoms influencing their parenting, family relationships, and interactions with child welfare professionals. This research illuminated mothers' resilience and bonds to their children, and how trauma symptoms create barriers for mothers navigating the child welfare system and accessing their support networks. This underscored the need for trauma sensitive care from family therapists, but also from other professionals embedded in the child welfare system. After completing her graduate studies, Dr. Schmittel worked in several private practices (Chicago and St. Louis) to hone her skills as a couple and family therapist and supervisor. She currently supervises and mentors MFTs in training, including local NCU students and graduates. Recently, Dr. Schmittel, along with a team of NCU faculty published a qualitative study on Telesupervision in the Journal of Contemporary Family Therapy. This project captured the experiences of faculty telesupervisors in the NCU MAMFT program. It illustrated how faculty telesupervision in a graduate program is successful when it is structured and intentional in building relationships with stakeholders and focusing on the core competencies of the MFT profession. Additionally, they found that MFT supervisors' training in a systemic lens is truly an asset for telesupervision as it helps conceptualize the multiple factors that influence the telesupervision relationship. SPOTLIGHT Faculty

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