Illinois SMVF

"Heidi Squier Kraft received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the UC San Diego/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology in 1996. She joined the Navy during her internship at Duke University Medical Center and went on to serve as both a flight and clinical psychologist. Her active duty assignments included the Naval Safety Center, the Naval Health Research Center and Naval Hospital Jacksonville, FL. While on flight status, she flew in nearly every aircraft in the Navy and Marine Corps inventory, including more than 100 hours in the F/A-18 Hornet, primarily with Marine Corps squadrons. In February 2004, she deployed to western Iraq for seven months with a Marine Corps surgical company, when her boy and girl twins were 15-months-old. RULE NUMBER TWO is a memoir of that experience. Dr. Kraft left active duty in 2005, after nine years in the Navy. She currently serves as Chief Clinical Officer at PsychArmor Institute, a national non-profit dedicated to evidence-based education for those who live with, care for, and work with the military-connected community. She is frequently invited to speak at conferences and panels on stress, vicarious trauma, and military culture. She is a lecturer at San Diego State University, where she teaches Stress, Trauma and the Psychological Experience of Combat, Health Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Field Placement, and Infant and Child Development. Dr. Kraft lives in San Diego with her husband Mike, a former Marine Harrier pilot. Her twins Brian and Meg, who have no memory of their mother’s time in Iraq, are in college now."

Dr. Megan McCarthy is the Deputy Director of Suicide Prevention in the Veteran’s Health Administration Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention. As Deputy Director, Dr. McCarthy’s work focuses on the development of VA’s comprehensive public health approach to suicide prevention and on oversight of the office’s day-to-day operations. Dr. McCarthy is also an Assistant Health Sciences Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. She received a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, where she studied philosophy and international relations, and a doctorate in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her doctoral internship at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and a postdoctoral clinical fellowship specializing in psychotherapy for underserved communities at Harvard Medical School.