Patricia Phelan, Ph.D.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Dr. Phelan attended Portland Public Schools and earned her B.S. Degree in Education at Oregon State University. In 1973, she joined the Urban/Rural School Development Program at Stanford University where she consulted with and provided assistance to schools serving low-income and ethnically diverse children and families throughout the United States. Subsequently she obtained her Masters Degree in Anthropology (1978) and her Ph.D. in Anthropology of Education (1981) at Stanford University. Dr. Phelan’s dissertation involved research in one of the first programs in the country to treat incest victims and their families. In addition to her research agenda, she worked as a therapist for nearly six years with women incest survivors, adolescent victims, and father incest perpetrators and their wives.

Dr. Phelan’s interests in education and mental health led to her appointment as a faculty member in the Medical Anthropology Program in the Medical School at the University of California, San Francisco (1982-1988). During this time her research continued to focus on mental health issues of children and adolescents. She also held an appointment as an adjunct faculty member at Stanford University where she taught in the Graduate School of Education. From 1989-1992, she continued her work at Stanford as a Senior Research Scholar exploring the relationship between adolescent’s lives and contexts and their involvement in school. During this time she spent hundreds of hours in high schools in California to understand, from the perspective of youth, those things that impact students’ connection with schools and learning including the kinds of pressures and problems that youth face. This work resulted in the publication of numerous articles, books chapters and two books, Renegotiating Cultural Diversity in American Schools and Adolescents’ Worlds: Negotiating Family, Peers, and School. During this time, she was also a faculty member on the Stanford Evaluation Consortium focusing on the evaluation of schools and programs for struggling youth.

In 1992, Dr. Phelan joined the faculty as a Professor at the University of Washington where she helped to develop a Masters Degree Program for teachers and designed an academic concentration on at-risk children and youth. Her teaching included such courses as Psychosocial Problems of Youth, Seeing Promise in At-Risk Youth, and Social Contexts of Youth. For three years Dr. Phelan’s research was supported by a Spencer Foundation Grant to study programs, policies, and practices that support students’ social, emotional, and academic well-being. In 1996 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and was one of six invited senior teaching and research scholars from the United States to Australia where she served on the faculty at the University of Launceston, Tasmania. During her ten years at the University of Washington, Dr. Phelan continued her involvement in schools as a member of the Nathan Hale Teen Health Clinic Advisory Board and as a facilitator for grief and loss groups and drug and alcohol groups for high school students.

During her tenure as an educational and therapeutic consultant, Dr. Phelan was an active member of the Independent Educational Consultants Association. In 2013 she was selected as the consultant representative to the Board of Directors of the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs. She is the mother of an adult son.