Judith S. Beck, PhD

Judith S. Beck, Ph.D., is the President of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy (www.beckinstitute.org), a non-profit organization in suburban Philadelphia, which she co-founded with Aaron T. Beck, M.D., in 1994. Through the Institute, she has trained thousands of health and mental health professionals, nationally and internationally. She is also Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. Prior to this, she spent several years teaching children, age 5-7, who had learning disabilities. Currently, she divides her time among teaching and supervision, administration, clinical work, program development, research, and writing. Dr. Beck has written nearly 100 articles and chapters and made hundreds of presentations, nationally and internationally, on a variety of topics related to cognitive behavior therapy. She is the author of the widely adopted textbook, Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond, translated into over 20 languages, a new edition of which was published in 2011. Her other books include Cognitive Therapy for Challenging Problems: What to do When the Basics Don’t Work; Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders and the Oxford Textbook of Psychotherapy. She has written extensively on a cognitive behavioral approach to weight loss. Her latest book for consumers, The Diet Trap Solution, was published in April 2015. She is also the co-author of the Beck Youth Inventories and the Personality Belief Questionnaire.