Carmen Knudson-Martin, PhD, LMFT, is recognized for her work regarding gender, marital equality, and relational health. She is a founder of Socio-Emotional Relationship Therapy, an approach that attends to the micro-processes through which couple interaction, emotion, and socio-cultural context come together in the moment by moment of clinical process. Her book, Couples, Gender, and Power: Creating Change in Intimate Relationships, weaves a link between research and practice as she makes the influence of the larger social context in couple relationships come alive and offers a step by step template to guide clinical work, with an emphasis on the political and ethical implications of therapist actions. She has published over 50 articles articulating the importance of the larger social context on issues such as marital equality, relational development, postpartum depression, women’s health, and couple therapy. Her international research team has conducted over 25 qualitative studies examining the processes through which diverse couples in varying life stages and circumstances respond to the demands of a changing social environment.

Carmen is a Professor and Director of the Marital, Couple, and Family Therapy Program at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. She is a past president of the American Association for Marital and Family Therapy, California Division and currently serves on the Board of directors of the American Family Therapy Academy, is vice-president of the Family Process Institute, and series editor of the Springer AFTA Family Therapy Briefs. Her edited volume “Socio-Emotional Relationship Therapy: Bridging Emotion, Societal Context, and Couple Interaction was released in February 2015.