Cynthia Rollo-Carlson joined USC in 2012 as an adjunct assistant professor and became a full-time senior lecturer in 2016. She teaches foundation courses in Human Behavior and the Social Environment, Integrative Social Work Practice courses, Grief, Loss and Bereavement in Social Work, Substance and Behavioral Addictive Disorders as well as Assessment and Diagnosis of Mental Disorders. Committed to social justice and policy change, she has focused her current work on addressing trauma, loss and suicide among the Active Duty and Veteran populations on both the state and national levels.

Her prior academic experience includes a teaching appointment at the College of Lake County in Illinois, where she taught sociology, human service and chemical dependency courses. She also worked in the social work department at Bemidji State University, where she taught undergraduate social work courses for 11 years before coming to USC.   Holding a master’s degree in English, she also taught college writing at BSU. She has merged these two fields together to specialize in therapeutic writing as a means for spiritual transformation in grief and loss recovery.

Rollo-Carlson graduated from New Directions through the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis in 2006. New Directions is a post-graduate program for clinicians and academics who apply a psychoanalytic perspective to professional and personal writing. A published poet and academic writer as well as a newspaper columnist, she addresses social issues related to military service. She is a licensed clinical social worker in Hawaii and a licensed independent clinical social worker in Minnesota, where she is also a licensing supervisor. In addition, she is a licensed alcohol and drug counselor in Minnesota and is a certified thanatologist through the Association for Death Education and Counseling.

She was appointed to the Cass County Health, Human and Veterans Services Advisory Board representing children and families and she has been a peer reviewer for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Division of Grant Review. She served as a consultant for the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, part of the MN Chippewa Tribe. As a recipient of the Soldier Suicide Prevention Scholarship, she received specialized training through the Beck Institute on post-traumatic stress disorder cognitive behavior therapy and experiential CBT.

She holds a certificate of completion of training in EMDR, and is also trained in Cognitive Processing Therapy, Prolonged Exposure Therapy and Motivational Interviewing. Along with teaching full time at USC, she currently works as  a psychotherapist specializing in grief & loss at a private group practice one day a week providing individual counseling services.