Heather Servaty-Seib

Dr. Servaty-Seib is a psychologist and Professor in the Doctoral Program in Counseling Psychology at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She is currently serving as Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning and Associate Dean of Student Life in the Honors College at Purdue University. She is well published in the areas of young adult bereavement and suicide, social support and grief, and the use of loss as a broad model for conceptualizing significant life events. She and her active and productive grief and loss research team have developed a measure, the Perceived Impact of Life Event Scale (PILES), which uses a gain/loss framework (i.e., all life events involve both gains and losses; Servaty-Seib, 2014) to assess the multidimensional impact of single life events. Much of her recent scholarship has been focused in the area of college student bereavement including a co-edited volume (published by Jossey-Bass) entitled Assisting Bereaved College Students and an edited volume of narratives by grieving college students (published by Jessica Kingsley). Her scholarship has been used to support the development of college student grief absence policies at Purdue and other U.S. institutions. Dr. Servaty-Seib serves on the editorial boards of four death-related academic journals. She is a past president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) and received the ADEC 2013 Death Educator Award. She was recently selected to serve as the lead co-editor of the next edition of the Handbook of Thanatology, to be published by ADEC in 2021.