Pamela Steiner

Dr. Pamela Steiner is a Fellow with the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health and an Associate of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

She directs the Intercommunal Trust Building Project, which aims to contribute to an improvement in the relationship between Armenian and Turkish communities.

More generally, the project seeks to add to understanding of the psychology that propels violence between communities as well as the psychology of healing and building productive relationships post-violence. The project’s primary activities have included Track 2 workshops for Armenian and Turkish participants and a public meeting with Hasan Cemal. Dr. Steiner speaks and lectures widely on these topics. To identify more transformative and hence more effective possibilities for the work of conflict resolution, she is writing a book on the sources and manifestations of collective trauma in the Armenian/Turkish/Azeri and the Jewish/German/Israeli/Palestinian situations.

She co-founded the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center of International Affairs (1995-2003). She has extensive experience in conflict resolution and reconciliation efforts, especially with Germans and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians, and Armenians and Turks.

Dr. Steiner also practices as a psychotherapist specializing in working with individuals with a history of trauma. She is certified in Somatic Experiencing, a new approach to healing from trauma. For twelve years she was a Clinical Instructor in Psychology at Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Steiner holds an M.A. in Government from Harvard University, and an M.Ed. in Counseling and Consulting Psychology and an Ed.D. in Developmental Psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.