Rebecca Smith-Casey

Dr. Smith-Casey received a B.A. in Psychology and a B.S. in Law & Justice from The College of New Jersey, followed by a Juris Doctor from Villanova School of Law. She passed the bar exam in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania and worked as a consultant in a private forensic psychology practice for several years before completing her doctorate. Dr. Smith-Casey completed a Master's in Educational Psychology at Kean University and then earned her Psy.D. in Combined School and Clinical Psychology from Kean University in 2016. She is presently a licensed clinical psychologist in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, authorized for practice under the Psychology Interjurisdictional Compact (PsyPact), and a New Jersey Certified School Psychologist. Dr. Smith-Casey completed her internship at Girard Medical Center in Philadelphia, PA where she provided outpatient and acute inpatient services to individuals with comorbid mental health and substance abuse disorders. Dr. Smith-Casey's post-doctoral training was at the Joseph J. Peters Institute (JJPI) in Philadelphia, PA where she provided individual trauma therapy and completed psychosexual evaluations for children, adolescents, and adults with a history of trauma, where she remained for a total of 4 additional years following her post-doc experience. Additionally, Dr. Smith-Casey has provided group and individual therapy to individuals committed to a state forensic hospital, worked with adolescents in a residential treatment facility for sexual offenders, provided court mandated anger management treatment to individuals on probation for domestic violence related offenses, provided interventions for adolescents in out of district school placements for children with emotional and behavioral disturbances, and engaged in assessments to guide parole recommendations for individuals in a community re-integration center following state incarceration.

Dr. Smith-Casey's dissertation involved the creation and validation of a measure of competency to stand trial, the New Jersey Competency Assessment Tool (NJ-CAT). Her research interests focus on issues at the intersection of law and psychology, to include expanded work with the NJ-CAT, the impact of special education history on forensic assessment, impact of trauma history in forensic assessment, resiliency factors in survivor's of sexual trafficking, and issues pertaining to forensic assessment in criminal matters. Dr. Smith-Casey has had recent conference presentations on trauma assessment, the issues related to special education history in forensic assessment, police pre-employment and return to duty evaluations, the psychological impacts of solitary confinement, mental health courts in rural communities, gender affirming care in correctional settings, intimate partner violence, and the competency of a parent with intellectual disabilities to waive Miranda for a juvenile in police custody.