Shannon Sauer-Zavala, Ph.D., Director of Clinical Services

Dr. Sauer-Zavala co-founded the Clinic for Emotional Health (CEH) with the mission to improve the lives of people with mental health difficulties by expanding access to evidence-based treatment, training future treatment providers, and conducting cutting edge clinical research. Dr. Sauer-Zavala is a licensed clinical psychologist with over 15 years of experience providing cognitive-behavioral interventions. She is also the co-developer of the Unified Protocol for the Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders, a well-known and effective cognitive-behavioral intervention for anxiety, depressive, and related disorders. To ensure that more patients have access to high-quality care, Dr. Sauer-Zavala founded the Unified Protocol Institute, an initiative dedicated to training clinicians to provide evidence-based treatment; in this role, she is invited to provide training workshops all over the world. 

In addition to her role at CEH, Dr. Sauer-Zavala is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Kentucky (UK). Dr. Sauer-Zavala received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from UK in 2011; she completed her predoctoral internship at Duke University Medical Center and her postdoctoral fellowship at Boston University. She then spent seven years on the faculty in BU’s Department of Psychological and Brain Science before returning home to UK in 2019. Her research is focused on exploring emotion-focused mechanisms that maintain psychological symptoms (particularly high-risk symptoms such as suicidal thoughts and behaviors) and using this information to develop more targeted, easily-disseminated intervention strategies. Her research has been supported by NIMH, NIAAA, Templeton Foundation, the Center for Implementation and Improvement Sciences, and the Canadian Institute of Health Research. Dr. Sauer-Zavala has co-authored over 75 peer-reviewed articles, numerous book chapters, and three books.