TACE Presenter
Eileen Burker, Ph.D., CRC
Associate Professor/Director,
Rehabilitation Counseling & Psychology- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Eileen J. Burker, Ph.D., CRC, Associate Professor joined the University of North Carolina faculty in August 1992. She earned her BS degree in Psychology from Rider College. She earned an MA degree in Rehabilitation Counseling with an emphasis in Vocational Evaluation and a Master’s level certificate in Gerontology from the University of Georgia. After working as the vocational evaluator and rehabilitation counselor in a chronic pain treatment center in Savannah, GA for three years she returned to graduate school to pursue a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology at Auburn University. She earned an MS degree and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Auburn. She completed her internship in Clinical Psychology at Duke University Medical Center. She was then awarded an NIH post-doctoral fellowship in Behavioral Medicine at Duke University Medical Center. After completing her post-doctoral fellowship, Eileen came to UNC as an assistant professor. She formed a relationship with the UNC Heart and Lung Transplant Programs and has served as their clinical psychologist since 1993. Her research focuses on quality of life, psychological distress, coping, religiosity, and vocational functioning before and after lung and heart transplant. She has been funded to study the quality of life pre- and post-lung transplant in patients with cystic fibrosis and in patients with other types of end-stage lung disease. She has also been funded to study the relationship between religiosity and spirituality and quality of life in patients before and after heart and lung transplant. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Allied Health Sciences and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry as well as the Director of the Rehabilitation Counseling and Psychology program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.