Alma Dell Smith, Ph.D. is Research Assistant Professor at the National Mass Violence Center at the Medical University of South Carolina.Dr. Smith’s role in the National Mass Violence Center is to assist in the coordinating of Internet activity and in developing new online courses and online apps, particularly Transcend, an app to support victims of mass violence. An important part of her career has been the dissemination of evidence based and technical aspects of psychology to the general public, bringing the best of the research on stress to a wide ranging clientele in hospitals, outpatient clinics, graduate programs, corporate settings and through popular books.
The majority of her career has been in the area of stress assessment and treatments with a special emphasis on psychophysiological effects of stress. Dr. Smith was a pioneer in integrative medicine at the Women’s Health Unit at Boston Medical Center where she specialized in coordinating psychological and medical care in an urban health clinic. Dr. Smith served on the faculty of Boston University Medical Center, the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, and the Biobehavioral Institute of Boston. She was the cofounder of Stress Directions, Inc, a national consulting firm for businesses and institutions. In that capacity, she coauthored an online stress assessment tool which has been widely used to assess stress resilience, stress symptoms and situations. This program then delivered helpful tools tailored to the specific needs of users. In addition, she coauthored two popular books on stress, The Stress Solution and Stress and Marriage.
Dr. Smith completed her undergraduate coursework at Smith College and earned her M.A. and PH.D in Clinical Psychology from the University of Georgia in 1979.