Kathryn Thomas
Associate Research Scholar in Psychiatry and Core Faculty at the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice• kathryn.thomas@yale.edu
Kathryn Thomas is a Clinical Lecturer in Law and Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale Law School’s The Justice Collaboratory and Yale School of Medicine’s SEICHE Center for Health and Justice.
She is a clinical psychologist and lawyer by training, and holds a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a J.D. from Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Her research interests sit at the intersection of psychology and the criminal legal system. She is particularly interested in the health-harming impacts of incarceration and wrongful conviction from a legal epidemiological perspective, and factors that impact trajectories of psychological adjustment upon re-entry following incarceration. She is a licensed psychologist, and has conducted forensic evaluations and provided evidence-based therapy to justice-involved clients in a variety of forensic settings (including a forensic hospital, juvenile court clinic, and forensic drug diversion program).
Kathryn recently completed her clinical internship at Yale School of Medicine’s Doctoral Internship in Clinical and Community Psychology. She currently provides training about mental health and crisis intervention to Connecticut law enforcement through the Connecticut Alliance to Benefit Law Enforcement’s Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training program. She is a licensed attorney in the State of Connecticut and has experience in criminal defense, post-conviction appeals, and §1983 civil rights litigation. She is currently a Clinical Lecturer in Law in the Advanced Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic at Yale Law School and consults on cases at the Office of the Federal Defender for the District of Connecticut.