Supervising Faculty
Gina Zanardelli, Ph.D. (she/her)
Internship Training Director and Associate Professor; Licensed Psychologist
Chatham University
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After spending 10 years providing mental health services to college students, I transitioned to a faculty position in Chatham’s Graduate Psychology program. When our Counseling Center decided to begin a doctoral internship, I was excited to find myself the Internship Training Director. I’m passionate about training practicum and internship students and to return to the Counseling Center world balances my love of teaching classes with supervision and training.
In supervision and training, I lead with cultural humility and open the door for conversations about your experiences in training. I also value integrating social identities and diversity contexts of our lives without assuming that our identities are playing a role in our work or in our clients’ lives. I believe a supportive environment is necessary for supervision to work so we can explore your strengths, successes, growth edges, and challenges. Finally and not least important, attention to clinician wellness is essential so we can do good.
Clinically, I am a generalized with a specialization in strength based and therapeutic assessment. Providing therapeutic assessment feels like helping someone put the pieces of their puzzle together in a way that makes sense to them. Assessment becomes a useful resource rather than a mysterious and potentially pathologizing process. Theoretically, I conceptualize clients from a culturally informed and interpersonal process framework. My approach explores the familial, identity-based (e.g., bias, discrimination, microaggressions), health, and environmental, experiences that may be influencing clients’ concerns.
In pursuit of my own wellness, I’m a distance runner, a baker, a novice gardener, and a hobby photographer. My two pandemically acquired cats, Nutmeg and Nigel, love to help me wake up for my early morning runs.
We welcome you to review our internship materials, as questions of any of us, and consider joining us for your internship year. I wish you the very best as you move into this final stage of your journey to become a psychologist.
Elsa Arce, Ph.D. (she/her)
Counseling Center Director; Licensed Psychologist
Chatham University
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My career background has been amazingly fruitful in experience for me. I started as a Clinical Psychologist in Peru more than 30 years ago and managed a Counseling Center in a private college there. I found my work extremely interesting while helping young adults and adults transitioning in their personal development. Terrorism hit my country and it was too dangerous for us to continue living there. My husband and I decided to seek higher level academics accepted to pursue our doctoral degrees in the US. It was a hard transition leaving our families and friends, speaking another language, and understanding a different culture. However, resilience and perseverance brought me to the place that I am now as the Director of the Counseling Center for more than 26 years at Chatham after achieving my doctoral degree in Counseling Psychology. I believe that my background has helped me in helping others to reach their goals as well.
My passion is my work and has different faces: as a therapist, as a consultant, as a supervisor of trainees, and as an administrative manager. My clinical and supervisory work is eclectic, based on dynamic work. I am very much interested in the life experience and difficulties related to trauma of our clients so I can help them reflect about these life situations and make honest and good decisions in their relationships for a healthy future life. Personally, I am an avid artist (drawing and painting) and usually try to incorporate my art skills while helping clients to be able to express their experiences through media.
For my trainees, it is important to meet them where they are regarding their therapeutic skills while encouraging them to find their best framework to not only their clients, but to encourage them to become their absolute best in their professional and personal lives. My life experience continues teaching me how we can help each other in so many ways by providing a safe space to talk about accomplishments, worries, and specially difficulties. As we know the work of each other, I believe that it would enhance our trainees experience and will enable them to be prepared to give their best in the present and future therapeutic work.
Michele Mattis, Psy.D. (she/her)
Director of Behavioral Health; Licensed Psychologist
Independence Health System
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I am the Director of Behavioral Sciences within the Latrobe Family Medicine Residency Program. I am a licensed psychologist and a licensed professional counselor. I am also certified as a K-12 school counselor. I have worked in a variety of settings including hospitals, college counseling centers, public education, behavioral health agencies, and with families in their homes. This variety has served as a solid foundation to help understand individuals from a systemic, culturally informed approach.
I approach therapy using an existential framework. In other words, all of us are searching for answers to difficult questions about what choices to make to increase our sense of purpose and happiness. We may need help forming connections and meaningful relationships with others because we feel alone or isolated. I am not here to give patients any answers, but to empower them to find options within themselves.
Similarly as a supervisor, I believe the most powerful tool available is the utilization of the self in the moment. Positive outcomes occur when supervisors focus on the learning process rather than the content; encourage a positive, safe, working relationship with students; and strive to fully understand the developmental growth that occurs throughout the internship. Through this educational journey, interns become equipped with the tools necessary to challenge socially constructed, oppressive hierarchies, finding within themselves the power to become agents of social change.
On a personal note, I am native to the area and passionate about improving the services in the community. I am an avid Steeler fan and enjoy spending time with family and my two golden retrievers, Triskit and Sydney. When I’m not working you can typically find me engaging in home improvement projects, landscaping, and gardening. I also enjoy playing disc golf, reading, bowling, and musical events.
Thank you again for your interest in our internship. Please contact me if you have any questions about the program. Good luck with your search and above all, please take good care of yourself during the interview season and match process!
Jennifer Q. Morse, Ph.D. (she/her)
Executive Director of Counseling and Wellness and Faculty; Licensed Psychologist
Chatham University
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After more than a decade of NIMH-funded clinical research focused on late-life mood disorders and adult personality disorders, especially borderline personality disorder, I have been happy to switch gears to teaching graduate students in Counseling Psychology and to focusing my scholarship and University service on diversity climate surveys and social justice education. I put my grant writing skills to good use to secure Health Resources and Services Administration Behavioral Workforce Education and Training grants for our MS and PsyD students working in integrated care settings, particularly with historically excluded populations and for students who themselves hold similar identities. When the opportunity arose to deepen the relationship between the Counseling Psychology doctoral program and the Counseling Center practicum training, it was a good fit for me even though it resulted in reduced time in the classroom. Training and supervising students fills that gap that teaching less leaves.
I work to approach clinical work and supervision with cultural humility and to attend to the systemic pressures impacting both clients and trainees. My graduate training focused on behavioral and learning-based psychotherapies and I am a certified supervisor and trainer in Problem Solving Therapy. Rather than cookie-cutter approaches, I find that these therapeutic approaches can be powerful when a client’s expertise in their own life and experience and open discussion of context and systems of oppression are part of the conceptualization and intervention.
I supervise like I mentor and teach – warmly, with high expectations and lots of scaffolding, with willingness to get into the weeds (answering “stupid” questions, role playing) and respecting autonomy and professional growth, and with discussion of work-life process and of learning professionalism and self-compassion instead of continued perfectionism. (Work-life balance implies, to me, that there is a balance point which can be held; process to me means that the balance point is often moving.) I try to model the same and thus make mistakes all the time.
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I have spent most of my clinical career practicing in collegiate mental health settings wherein I have honed my generalist counseling skills. After a brief detour practicing within an outpatient group private practice for a few years, I have returned to my passion of practicing within a university setting. Among my passion for university counseling work is my enthusiasm for engaging in clinical training and supervision, and group counseling. My areas of expertise include mood and anxiety disorders, women’s issues, life transitions, stress management, academic stress, relationship concerns, and concerns related to being a first-generation/non-traditional student. In addition to practicing in the Chatham Counseling Center, I am also an adjunct instructor in Chatham University’s Graduate Psychology program.
My treatment approach and theoretical orientation includes an integration of interpersonal process-oriented, positive psychology, strength-based, and multiculturally-informed approaches. As a supervisor, I use a developmental and multiculturally informed approach. Just as my counseling approach is integrated and tailored to the individual needs of the client, as is my approach when working with supervisees.
On a personal note, in my free time I enjoy time spent outdoors either camping and hiking in the woods, exploring mountains, or relaxing oceanside.
Affiliated Training Faculty
Leigh Skvarla, Ph.D., LCP (she/her)
Consultant and Supervisor for Athletics
Chatham University
Leigh is our consultant for our trainees who work with athletes. While we do not offer a specialty in working with athletes, if interns are interested, we will work with the intern so they can engage in some work with athletes. Leigh does not serve as an individual supervisor.