Zafra Cooper

Dr Cooper is an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University Department of Psychiatry and director of the Eating Disorders in Veterans study funded by the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP). Previously she was Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University where she was jointly responsible for management of the internationally recognized Centre for Research on Eating Disorders at Oxford (CREDO). Funded for many years by the Wellcome Trust, the centre studied various aspects of eating disorders, including their diagnosis and classification, their characterization and measurement, their aetiology and course and most importantly their treatment. In particular it specialized in the development and evaluation of treatments for eating disorders and obesity. The centre was responsible for the development of the transdiagnostic treatment for eating disorders, one of the leading evidence-based treatments endorsed by the influential UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines and the development of a universally used and accepted standardized method of assessing eating disorder psychopathology. While at Oxford, funded by a strategic award from the Wellcome Trust Dr Cooper jointly established a centre for research on the dissemination of evidence -based treatments and directed the research on measuring clinician competence and evaluating clinician training. Her ongoing research focuses on further treatment development with an emphasis on improving interventions for eating disorders co-occurring with other conditions (e.g., obesity and PTSD) and bridging the treatment gap by making treatment and provider training more accessible.