Elizabeth Pienkos

Dr. Liz Pienkos is a clinical psychologist who studies the phenomenology of schizophrenia and psychosis. Her research uses qualitative methods and philosophical and clinical inquiry to explore the mechanisms and features of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. Her recent work focuses on situating phenomenological psychopathology, expanding phenomenological models to include subjective features of individuals’ social, cultural, and historical worlds. At Duquesne, she leads the Situated Phenomenology Lab, which is open to graduate students interested in developing novel research projects emphasizing the intertwining of self and world in subjective experience. 

Dr. Pienkos was first introduced to phenomenological psychopathology by Dr. Louis Sass during her graduate studies at Rutgers University. Following the publication of several articles on alterations of self- and world-experience in schizophrenia and other psychiatric conditions, Dr. Sass and Dr. Pienkos developed the Examination of Anomalous World Experience (EAWE), a semi-structured phenomenological interview that explores alterations of space, time, interpersonal experience, language, atmosphere, and existential orientation that may occur in schizophrenia. Dr. Pienkos’s dissertation was a qualitative phenomenological study using the EAWE to interview individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum and depressive disorders. Dr. Pienkos has offered workshops on the EAWE to researchers, clinicians, and students at Duquesne and internationally.

Dr. Pienkos received her Psy.D. in 2014 from the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University, where she received training in psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral approaches to psychotherapy. She completed her clinical internship at the Nova Scotia Health Authority (then Capital District Health Authority) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and stayed on for subsequent postdoctoral training and employment. During this time, she gained experience in a broad range of settings and populations, including community mental health, forensics, unexplained medical symptoms, and severe and persistent mental illness. She is licensed in the states of New York and Pennsylvania; she maintains a private practice working with adults and supervises the clinical work of doctoral students at Duquesne. 

 

• Psy.D, Clinical Psychology, Graduate School of Applied and professional Psychology, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
• BA, summa cum laude, Fresnch Studies, Rice University, Houston, TX

• Phenomenological Psychopathology