Irvin Schonfeld

When I was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, I majored in psychology and minored mathematics. I became a mathematics teacher for the New York City Board of Education. While teaching in a troubled inner city school, I earned a master's degree, attending the New School for Social Research at night, after work. I informally observed that the chaotic, and sometimes violent, circumstances of the school had a baleful effect on many of my  teacher colleagues. These observations contributed to a future line of research, a line of research I would not have anticipated at the time I was teacher. Eventually I left teaching to pursue a doctorate full-time at the CUNY Graduate Center. At the GC I combined developmental psychology with educational psychology, and conducted research on children's mathematical cognition. About a year after I earned a Ph.D., I obtained a research associate position at New York State Psychiatric Institution/Dept. of Psychiatry, Columbia University. Working with David Shaffer, I became involved in research on psychopathology and attentional impairments in adolescents. I earned a post-doctoral fellowship with the Psychiatric Epidemiology Training Program at Columbia. It was there that, under the influence of Bruce Dohrenwend and Bruce Link, I became interested stress research.

When I moved to City College, I wrote grant applications to underwrite research on the impact of job stressors on teachers. As a result of my interest in job stress, I came to identify with the emerging field of occupational health psychology. I am the founding editor of the Newsletter of the Society for Occupational Health Psychology (I relinquished my active editorial role in 2010) and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. While at City College, I obtained appointments to the doctoral faculty in the programs in Educational Psychology and Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. I also obtained an appointment in the Dept. of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the CUNY School of Public Health. I became involved in a number of projects, including research on burnout's overlap with depression and stress in the self-employed. I have written on the topics of school violence and bullying. Springer published a book I wrote with Prof. Chu-Hsiang (Daisy) Chang of Michigan State University. The book is entitled Occupational Health Psychology: Work, Stress, and Health.

I published two works of short fiction and have written a memoir, yet unpublished, about growing up in a Brooklyn housing project. I am also working on other pieces of short fiction that I hope to get published. When I am not working, I enjoy reading, photography, softball, and hiking. I am also interested in cinema, and have organized an informal film club.