Heather L. Servaty-Seib, Ph.D., HSPP
In this episode, Dr. Servaty-Seib‘s passion for the grieving young adult population shines through as she helps to raise awareness about the unique issues she sees not only on her campus, Purdue University, but also themes that have emerged from her research.
Heather is Professor in the Doctoral Program in Counseling Psychology at Purdue University, Associate Department Head of Educational Studies, and Associate Dean of Student Life in the Honors College. She is well published in the areas of adolescent/young adult bereavement and suicide, social support and grief, and the use of loss as a broad model for conceptualizing significant life events. She and her active and productive grief and loss research team have developed a measure, the Perceived Impact of Life Event Scale (PILES), which uses a gain/loss framework (i.e., all life events involve both gains and losses; Servaty-Seib, 2014) to assess the multidimensional impact of single life events. She was co-principal investigator of ALIVE @ Purdue — a three-year, campus suicide prevention grant received from the Department of Health and Human Services. Much of her recent scholarship has been focused in the area of college student bereavement including a co-edited volume (published by Jossey-Bass) entitled Assisting Bereaved College Students and an edited volume of narratives by grieving college students (published by Jessica Kingsley). Her scholarship has been used to support the development of college student grief absence policies at Purdue and other institutions, as highlighted in Chronicle of Higher Education (Peterkin, 2012). Recognition of her scholarly expertise is reflected at the national (e.g., manuscript of the year award, editorial board of 4 refered journals, media requests, invitations to write book chapters, sought out as external reviewer for tenure/promotion) and international (e.g., visiting academic at the University of Queensland, two visiting student scholars from Turkey) levels.
She is a past president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) and received the ADEC 2013 Death Educator Award.
