Dr. Grace H. Christ is associate professor at Columbia University School of Social Work in NYC and has clinical and research interests in the fields of psychosocial oncology, end-of-life and palliative care, trauma and traumatic loss, and interventions in childhood bereavement. She was formerly director of social work at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Among over 60 publications, she is the author of Healing Children’s Grief: Surviving a parent’s death from cancer, published in 2000 by Oxford University Press and author of a recent article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Adolescent Grief . These publications identified clinically relevant patterns of experience and expression of grief to parent loss at 5 different developmental levels through systematic analysis of 157 bereaved children. In 2004, the book Healing Children s Grief was recognized by the International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care leadership as one of 12 books providing critical new directions to the field for the 21st century.
Dr. Christ is currently Director of the FDNY-CSU/Columbia University Family Guidance Program. The FDNY collaboration provides evaluation and guidance for families in which a firefighter was killed in the World Trade Center. Through intervention with widows and their children, this program is developing an in depth understanding of the longer term process of recovery to sudden, traumatic, parent loss and identifying effective therapeutic responses to such disasters.
This unique collaboration is described in the new book, FDNY Crisis Counseling: Innovative Responses to 9/11 Firefighters, Families, and Communities, co-authored by Grace Christ.
Dr. Christ was recently a Senior Faculty Scholar with the Project on Death in America (PDIA) and director of their Social Work Leadership Development Awards Program. She has co-chaired the first and second Social Work Summits on End-of-Life and Palliative Care and currently co-chairs the steering committee of a new national organization, the Social Work Hospice/Palliative Care Network.
Dr. Christ has won research awards from both the American Cancer Society (1994) and the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (2001), respectively, as well as the National Leadership in Oncology Social Work Award from the Association of Oncology Social Workers (1991). She received her BA in Sociology from Wheaton College, an MA in Social Work at the University of Chicago, and her Doctorate of Social Work is from Columbia University.
Contact information
Office: 1255 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY
Phone: 212-851-2403
Email: ghc1 at columbia.edu
Current Courses
Social Work Practice III (T7113)
Social Work Practice IV (T7114)
Social Work Practice (T8201) - doctoral level
Social Work Interventions in Trauma, Grief and Loss - elective