Board Members

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Michael E. Kerr, MD

Michael E. Kerr, M.D. is a family psychiatrist. He trained under and worked with Murray Bowen for more than twenty years, and then succeeded Dr. Bowen as Director of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family (originally the Georgetown University Family Center) upon his death in 1990. He has been Emeritus Director of the Bowen Center since January 2011 and is now living in Maine. He continues a clinical practice, presents at conferences around the country, and writes about Bowen theory and its applications. He is co-author of Family Evaluation (with Murray Bowen) published in 1988 (excerpted in The Atlantic Monthly in September 1988). His newest book is Bowen Theory’s Secrets: Revealing the Hidden Life of Families. His research interests include cancer and family emotional process, the development of a unidisease concept, the relationship between human emotional process and emotional process in other species, and the process of differentiation of self.

Cheryl Lester

Cheryl Lester, PhD

Dr. Cheryl Lester is a literary historian interested in how the study and practice of Bowen family systems theory may lead motivated
individuals to develop more factual and objective perspectives on our families and ourselves. She studied in the Postgraduate Program at the Bowen Center in Washington, D.C. from 1997-2001. She is a longtime member of the Executive Committee of the Family History Database Project and the Board of the Kansas City Center for Family & Organizational Systems. Dr. Lester is an Associate Professor Emerita ofEnglish and American Studies at the University of Kansas, where she served on the faculty from 1987 until her retirement in 2018.

 

photo of Jim Edd JonesJames E. Jones, PhD

James E. Jones, PhD is a clinical psychologist. He grew up in southwest Oklahoma and north Texas. He received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Rice University. He was a Montessori teacher before beginning graduate school at the UCLA Psychology Department and working there on the UCLA Family Project. He then worked for 6 years on the University of Rochester Child and Family Study as a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry. For two years, he was Director of the Family and Marriage Clinic in that department. He then continued a full-time private practice for 15 years in Rochester and 22 years in Denver and Boulder, Colorado. In 1977-79 he was in the Postgraduate Training Program at the Georgetown Family Center.