Sara Tedrick Parikh is the executive director for the New Jersey Psychological Association and holds a PhD in Counseling Psychology from Purdue University. At NJPA, Sara oversees day-to-day operations for NJPA, NJPA Foundation, and NJP-PAC, including association governance, advocacy, and collaboration with other organizations and affiliates. Prior to her work with NJPA, Sara was a tenured associate professor in Caldwell University's School of Psychology & Counseling. Her specialty course was writing in psychology, and she also taught on a variety of topics including positive psychology, counseling psychology, psychology of women, career paths in psychology, interpersonal relationships, cross-cultural psychology, statistics, research methods, and general psychology. She served on Faculty Council, Promotion and Tenure, and various other committees. Her research projects included themes of grief, loss, and trauma in the show WandaVision and international students' coping after natural disasters in their home country. While at Purdue University, Sara worked on the grief and loss research team under Dr. Heather Servaty-Seib. Her research interests include college student grief and a focus on community outreach and service-learning. Her dissertation focused on the support gap between grieving students and their peers and on how to create an intervention that would overcome barriers to peer grief support. The first phase of her project was published in Death Studies and presented at APA 2010. She received the 2014 ADEC Graduate Student Paper Award for her final dissertation, which she presented at the 2014 ADEC Annual Conference in Baltimore.After practicum experiences including in-house clinics serving college students, community mental health, assessment, outreach, and suicide prevention, Sara completed her pre-doctoral internship in psychology at the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Shakopee, MN. While there, she conducted mental health screenings, facilitated groups (mental health and wellness, serious and persistent mental illness, grief), provided brief individual therapy, and completed psychological assessments. Sara's professional interests also include social justice, advocacy, and mentorship.In addition to her work at NJPA, Sara is an active member of the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC), an interdisciplinary group of professionals who work with issues surrounding death, dying, grief, and loss.