Board of Advisors

Ian Aitken serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of The Menninger Clinic in Houston, Texas. He is responsibility for overall leadership of The Clinic, including operational functions and implementation of the strategic plan. Previously, Mr. Aitken oversaw The Clinic's administrative, operational, marketing and network functions. He has served on The Clinic's management team since joining Menninger in 1996.

Mr. Aitken has worked in behavioral healthcare throughout his career. Prior to joining Menninger, he served as Vice President for health system development at Rock Creek Center, in the southwest Chicago suburb of Lemont, Illinois. He directed development of outpatient programs, physician recruitment and managed care contracting in a seven-state area. He also served as Vice President and CEO of Four Winds-Chicago Hospital at Lemont, a 60-bed proprietary behavioral health hospital with outpatient and off-site programs.

For 16 years, he held a number of administrative and program director positions in the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Disabilities. During this tenure, Mr. Aitken gained expertise in management and development of acute and extended care programs. While working in the public sector, Mr. Aitken also presented at state and national mental health conferences and was published in the Journal of Health and Human Resource Administration.

He is a graduate of Northern Illinois University.

Dr. Dranove has been a Professor for more than 15 years with Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, which maintains one of the country's leading business and healthcare management programs. He is the Walter McNerny Distinguished Professor of Healthcare Management and Strategy and was also the Richard Paget Distinguished Professor of Management and Strategy and Professor of Health Services Management. Dr. Dranove maintains a high public profile as a leading health economist and is influential in the application of economics to solve complex legal and health care policy problems. He assists the firm's clients in all areas of health care policy issues related to economics. Dr. Dranove has advised top officials of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission on health care issues and has published several articles on health care reform.

Dr. Dranove received his Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree in Business Administration from Cornell University and his PhD in Business Economics and Policy from Stanford University.

Dr. Gourguechon is a Past President of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Other previous positions with that organization include Secretary, Editor of the quarterly magazine The American Psychoanalyst, and Chair of a national fellowship program. Her leadership goals within psychoanalysis are numerous. They include establishing a comprehensive structure to provide psychoanalytic input to educational systems from pre-kindergarten to professional levels, and increasing the voice of psychoanalysis within the broader community to enhance the understanding of urgent social and cultural issues. In addition, she focuses on the core values of psychoanalysis (individualization of treatment, the sanctity of doctor/patient confidentiality and the importance of the therapeutic relationship) to try to influence the modern healthcare environment.

Dr. Gourguechon has a private practice in psychoanalysis and psychiatry in Northfield and Chicago, which includes providing psychoanalytic consultation to law firms and corporations.

Dr. Johnson has been a leader in the field of Eating Disorders for over 27 years. He is Director of the Eating Disorders Program at Laureate Psychiatric Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma Medical School and formerly held faculty appointments at Yale University, the University of Chicago and Northwestern University Medical Schools. He was the Founding Editor of the International Journal of Eating Disorders and a Founding Member of the Academy for Eating Disorders and the Eating Disorders Research Society. He is also Past President of the National Eating Disorders Association. Dr. Johnson has authored three books and over 70 scientific articles, and has received several distinguished contribution awards.

Previously, Joan Lebow was a principal and partner in Ulmer & Berne LLP. She concentrated on transactions in clinical services delivery, information technology transfer and licensing, corporate organization, intellectual property development and protection, reimbursement, insurance including ERISA and managed care and regulatory compliance. Her practice focused on entrepreneurial and clinical businesses.

Previously, Ms. Lebow served as General Counsel of ibex Healthdata Systems, Inc., which provides Web-based software applications to hospitals and physicians. As General Counsel, Ms. Lebow managed and provided all legal services, including development and protection of intellectual property assets, software licensing and sublicensing, and corporate transactions and employment. She served as Corporate Secretary and was a member of the Senior Executive Team.

Ms. Lebow started the Legal Department of Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago, and was its General Counsel for 13 years. During her tenure, she was responsible for regulatory compliance, and corporate transactions and managed all trials and appeals. She handled all insurance, including commercial and general liability, malpractice liability and self-insurance. Ms. Lebow provided all regulatory and transactional support of insurance subsidiaries. She also managed the regulatory compliance of the Medical Center, with emphasis in the areas of public and private reimbursement and clinical operations.

Prior to her work at Illinois Masonic, Ms. Lebow served as Assistant General Counsel of Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where she engaged in a broad healthcare and corporate practice. She represented Northwestern in state and federal administrative hearings, and handled ERISA and employee benefit issues, medical staff and licensed professional regulatory affairs. As an associate with the firm of Lord, Bissell & Brook, she handled direct litigation and appeals, insurance coverage disputes and general corporate matters.

Ms. Lebow is an Adjunct Professor of Health Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Chicago-Kent College of Law, and is a Scholar affiliated with the Institute of Science, Law and Technology, a joint program between IIT and Chicago-Kent. She is a member of the American Health Lawyers Association, the Illinois Association of Health Care Attorneys, the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms, and is a past President, Officer and Board Member of the Chicago Chapter of the American Corporate Counsel Association. She serves on the Board of the Little City Foundation, advises the Board of Directors of The Family Institute and actively raises funds for the Bottomless Closet and Literature for All of Us. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Senior Business Women's Forum.

Ms. Lebow received her Bachelor’s degree in Religious Philosophy from Pitzer College, The Claremont Colleges, in 1975, and received her JD from the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law, in 1978.

Jeffrey Nemetz is a Principal of HBG and a lead Brand Strategist for its global client base. He is responsible for creating the highly acclaimed “inside” brand process, a six-step proprietary program for brand development, deployment and diagnosis.  Mr. Nemetz has facilitated strategic branding sessions for start-up and established organizations on both the medical and consumer sides of healthcare. He is recognized nationally in branding and has been published and invited to lecture on the value of brands to leading professionals in the healthcare sector. In addition to his consulting career, Mr. Nemetz has had operational experience. Mr. Nemetz was President of Shane Oral Health Pharmaceuticals, makers of Shane Toothpaste, the only toothpaste in the world with a patented aloe vera formula.

Prior to his work with Shane, Mr. Nemetz was President/CEO of MedPro Software, a medical interactive multi-media company. MedPro was one of the first companies in the country to utilize this media for product promotion, physician education and sales training in the healthcare industry. Under his guidance, MedPro was awarded the opportunity to develop the first medical encyclopedia in CD-ROM format for World Book International. Mr. Nemetz also had product brand management experience working with two of Chicago’s heritage brands, McDonald’s, where he helped launch breakfast on a national scale, and Sunbeam.

Mr. Nemetz is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received his post-graduate degrees as a James Webb Young Fellow. Mr. Nemetz holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration, a Master’s of Science degree in Communications and a Bachelor of Science degree in Communications.

He is an active member of several professional healthcare associations and devotes significant time to multiple boards and charitable foundations, contributing his strategic skills and leadership experience.

Joseph Palombo, M.A., LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker. He received a master's degree (philosophy) from Yale University and a master's degree in social work from the University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration. Mr. Palombo specializes in the assessment and treatment of children, adolescents and adults with learning disabilities. Additionally, Mr. Palombo is the founding dean of the Institute for Clinical Social Work in Chicago, and is on the faculty of the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Program at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. At the Rush Neurobehavioral Center, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center, Department of Pediatrics, he serves as consultant to the staff and provides in service training. He is on the Board of Trustees of the Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education, Inc., and was the Co-Chair of the committee on Child and Adolescent Mental Health Disorders of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Task force of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM).

William Pinsof is President of The Family Institute, Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern University and the Director of the Center for Applied Psychological and Family Studies at Northwestern. He currently teaches in the Northwestern University Master of Science in Marital and Family Therapy Program and also teaches both undergraduate and post-doctoral courses for Northwestern University students.

His academic and research work has focused on evaluating the outcome of marital and family therapy, understanding the process of marital and family therapy, and the integration of different therapeutic approaches for maximal cost effectiveness.

His work on psychotherapy integration culminated in the publication of Integrative Problem Centered Therapy: A Synthesis of Family, Individual and Biological Therapies by Basic Books. He has also edited four books: Family Psychology: The Art of the Science, that he co-edited with Jay Lebow, published by Oxford University Press; a special issue of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy that he co-edited with Lyman C. Wynne, dedicated to reviewing all of the controlled research on the outcomes of couple and family therapy; a special issue of Family Process entitled, "Marriage in the 20th Century in Western Civilization:  Trends, Research, Therapy, and Perspectives;” and the classic work he co-edited with Leslie Greenberg, The Psychotherapeutic Process: A Research Handbook.

Additionally, Dr. Pinsof is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a Diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology. Dr. Pinsof received the Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Family Therapy Research Award from the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy in 1996, the Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice Award from the American Family Therapy Academy in 2001, and the 2001 Family Psychologist of the Year from the American Psychological Association Division 43 - Family Psychology.

Dr. Pinsof received his PhD in Clinical Psychology from York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is a licensed clinical psychologist and licensed marriage and family therapist as well as an approved supervisor of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. He treats individuals, couples and families.

Dr. Schore is an internationally recognized pioneer and scholar in the neuroscience of attachment and affect self-regulation. He is on the clinical faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine.  He is also the Editor of the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology.

Dr. Schore’s groundbreaking book, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self, integrates a large number of experimental and clinical studies from both the psychological and the biological disciplines in order to construct an over-arching model of social and emotional development. Since then he has expanded his regulation theory in more than two dozen articles and essays covering multiple disciplines, including neuroscience, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, attachment and trauma.

His book, Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) contains writings on developmental effective neuroscience and developmental neuropsychiatry. Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology #2) contains chapters on neuropsychoanalysis and developmentally-oriented psychotherapy. The Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology also publishes the Allan N. Schore Set and the Reader's Guide to Affect Regulation and Neurobiology.

Dr. Stout, a licensed clinical psychologist, is the former Chief Operating Officer. He is also a Clinical Full Professor at the University of Illinois' College of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry, holds an academic appointment in the Northwestern University Feinberg Medical School and was a Visiting Professor at Rush University. Dr. Stout is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, past-President of the Illinois Psychological Association, and is a Distinguished Practitioner in the National Academies of Practice. He is also a Fellow in the University of Illinois School of Public Health. Dr. Stout has published 30 books/manuals, including the popular Evidence-Based Practice (Wiley & Sons, 2005) and the College Counseling Treatment Planner (Wiley & Sons). His works have been translated into 7 languages. He was noted as being "one of the most frequently cited psychologists in the scientific literature" in a study by Hartwick College. He was awarded the APA's International Humanitarian Award (2004) and the 2006 Illinois Psychological Association's Humanitarian Award.

Dr. Stout served as a NGO Special Representative to the United Nations. He was appointed by the Secretary of the US Department of Commerce to the Board of Examiners for the Baldrige National Quality Award and served on Mrs. Gore's White House Conference on Mental Health. He also is the Founding Director of the Center for Global Initiatives. He holds the distinction of being one of only 100 world-wide leaders appointed to the World Economic Forum's Global Leaders of Tomorrow 2000 and he was an Invited Faculty at the Annual Meeting in Davos.

He is father to an adolescent son and a pre-teenage daughter.

Mark Solms is best known for his discovery of the forebrain mechanisms of dreaming, and his pioneering use of psychoanalytic methods and theories in contemporary neuroscience.

Born in Lüderitz in 1961, he was educated at Pretoria Boys' School and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He moved to London in 1988, where he worked at the Royal London Hospital (Honorary Lecturer in Neurosurgery) while he trained at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. He returned to South Africa in 2002, where he now holds a Professorship in Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town. He is a member of the South African Psychoanalytical Association and British Psychoanalytical Society, and Honorary Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.

Honors include the Sigourney Prize (2012), Honorary Fellowship of the American College of Psychiatrists (2016) and the IPA's Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award (2017). He is Chair of the Research Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association and Director of the Science Department of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

He has published more than 300 papers in both neuroscientific and psychoanalytic journals, and eight books, including The The Brain and the Inner World (2002),The Feeling Brain (2015) and Beyond Evolutionary Psychology (2018), the first of which was translated into 12 languages. He is the editor of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 vols) and the forthcoming Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud (4 vols).

Dr. Michael Strober is the Franklin Mint Professor of Eating Disorders and Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine, and Director of the Eating Disorders Program at UCLA’s Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neurospychiatric Hospital. 

Dr. Strober joined the faculty of the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences in 1975, and has served as Director of the Eating Disorders without interruption for the past 30 years. In addition to his extensive clinical expertise in the area of consultation and treatment, he has authored nearly 200 scientific articles and book chapters, and his accomplishments in research, service and teaching have been recognized by the National Eating Disorders Association (2005 Award for Excellence in Teaching), and the Academy for Eating Disorders (2005 Award for Excellence in Teaching and Education). His research activities have been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health for over 15 years, and focus on the role of personality, family and genetic influences in anorexia and bulimia nervosa, and predictors of long-term recovery. Today, the eating disorders program is recognized internationally as a center of excellence for the care it provides to children and adults.

Dr. Strober is a founding member and past President of the Eating Disorders Research Society, a Founding Fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders, has served as advisor and consultant to the National Institute of Mental Health on research priorities in eating disorders, and is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Eating Disorders. 

Dr. Tanner is currently a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers University. Prior to her fellowship years, she was Research Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Simmons College in Boston. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, books and handbooks and presented in professional forums. Dr. Tanner’s research program takes a multidisciplinary approach to developing theory of normal, abnormal and optimal development from adolescence to young adulthood, roughly ages 12 to 35. Complementing theory design, her empirical work takes advantage of cutting-edge methodologies to examine ways in which different pathways taken from adolescence through emerging and young adulthood are associated with diverse experiences and outcomes (e.g., mental health, health, functioning). She is dedicated to translating her work and the work of others to inform programs, policies and services that seek to enhance and optimize development and adjustment during the transition to adulthood.

Dr. Tanner balances her research career with teaching, consulting, advising and writing for a wide-variety of audiences including the book Emerging Adults in the 21st Century, which she co-authored with Jeffery Arnett, PhD.  She has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses since 1998 in departments of Psychology at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts; Human Development and Family Studies at the Pennsylvania State University; Child Development at Tufts University: and Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology at Boston College. Established with the First Conference on Emerging Adulthood in 2003, Dr. Tanner is Co-Chair of the Society for Research on Emerging Adulthood dedicated to the goal of connecting an interdisciplinary, international network of scholars interested in and dedicated to the study of individuals between ages 18 and 29. She serves on the Editorial Boards of The Journal of Adolescent Research and The Journal of Youth and Adolescence.