Katie Fracalanza, PhD
Dr. Katie Fracalanza is a Clinical Assistant Professor and the Director of Psychotherapy within the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Clinic at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. She also serves as the Clinic Director at the California Psychology Center, a Stanford-affiliated group private practice specializing in therapy for anxiety, OCD, and depression.
In these roles, Dr. Fracalanza provides training on evidence-based psychotherapy to postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and psychiatry residents. Her work also includes presenting training seminars and workshops on stress and anxiety.
Her research within the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Stanford aims to improve current treatments for anxiety and related disorders. This research is funded by a NARSAD Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. The book chapters and research articles she has authored cover topics such as how anxiety and worry are maintained over time, and how this knowledge can be applied in therapeutic practice.
Dr. Fracalanza’s roles in leadership and training contribute directly to what she offers her clients in therapy. Over the past several years, she has specialized in helping residents and fellows overcome mental health struggles such as anxiety, imposter syndrome, burnout, people-pleasing, perfectionism, and an inflated sense of responsibility.
Education & Training
Licensed Clinical Psychologist in California (PSY 28652)
Dr. Katie Fracalanza completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, where she specialized in anxiety, OCD, and mood disorders. She has extensive training in the following therapy modalities:
Clinical Research
Dr. Fracalanza has been working in the field of mental health since 2008. Her graduate school training includes a Master’s and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada.
The research she conducted throughout graduate school focused on better understanding factors that underpin anxiety and worry, such as perfectionism, self-criticism, and intolerance of uncertainty, and how interventions for these experiences might be optimized.
This work was recognized by the Canadian Psychological Association with a Certificate of Academic Excellence and was funded by awards from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
