Dr. Ilene Rosenstein



Biography

Looking at Dr. Ilene Rosenstein’s life for the last 35 years, she was constantly reading, researching, intervening on how to make the world a better place. In her 20s, she studied sociology and psychology, with special interest in Organizational and Community Psychology along with a focus on Family and Group Systems. She chose to get a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, which focuses on overall wellbeing and typical life stresses that affect people as individuals, groups, and organizations. In the late 1990s, she was blessed by the influence of Martin Seligman and the Positive Psychology movement at the University of Pennsylvania, where, as the Director of Counseling and Psychological Services, she emphasized prevention and outreach, especially to students, from a developmental approach (i.e. How do you help young adults embrace their identity, know their values and goals, succeed in obtaining them, and influence positively their environments.) After 22 years at Penn, she came to USC and served as Director of Student Counseling Services for nine years before Provost Michael Quick constructed the Office of Campus Wellbeing and Crisis Intervention in 2017, where she now serves as the Associate Vice Provost for Campus Wellbeing and Education. Although she has provided many trainings nationally and wrote professionally about threat assessment, crisis intervention, and treatment for individuals with personality disorders, her true interests and efforts remained connected with developing cultures of respect, care, and connection for all. The desire to have all people and organizations thrive in healthy communities was always the goal. Through this system’s lens, she developed a keen eye of how to increase life satisfaction through fulfillment of love and work. She has taught career development, group theory and dynamics, and various counseling theory courses for over 30 years. With her expertise in happiness, achievement, meaning, healing, and healthy relationships, Dr. Rosenstein works with individuals, groups, and organizations to cultivate success through trust, compassion, and meaning. To create solid healthy and flourishing environments that result in innovation, creativity, and achievement, Dr. Rosenstein serves as a consultant, executive coach, trainer, and strategic advisor so communities and institutions can thrive and reach their potential with a sense of pleasure, creativity, belonging, inclusion, and purpose in all that they do.