Dr. Joe Cohen is the founder of Brightmood and provides all of the services himself. We are intentionally small to ensure that every clinical service delivered by brightmood is by Dr. Cohen.

Dr. Cohen grew up in the Chicago suburbs and completed his undergraduate degree at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. In 2014, he received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. After completing his National Institutes of Health-funded postdoctoral fellowship in Child & Adolescent Trauma Research at the Medical University of South Carolina, he returned to the state of Illinois to be closer to family and began a tenured-track faculty position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the Psychology Department.

Currently, Dr. Cohen is an Associate Professor in the Clinical-Community program at UIUC. His research focuses on the relation between adversity and well-being in adolescents and adults. His research is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Justice. He has published over 60 peer-review articles on depression, anxiety, PTSD, potentially traumatic events, and psychological well-being across the lifespan. For his research, he has been awarded the American Psychological Association Early Career Award, the Association of Psychological Science Rising Star Award, and a NIMH CHIPS Fellow.

In 2015, he became a licensed clinical psychologist and began the Childhood Adversity and Resilience Services (CARS) clinic at UIUC. For the CARS clinic, Dr. Cohen supervised a team of doctoral students in the clinical-community psychology program to provide services in the local community. In total, in a little over 8 years, the CARS clinic provided services to over 100 families in the Urbana-Champaign community.

Along the entirety of this professional journey, Dr. Cohen has had the love and support of his wife Amy Cohen, also a clinical psychologist, who specializes in Autism Spectrum Disorders across the lifespan. Together they have three children and one dog.

In brightmood, Dr. Cohen seeks to deliver a new type of mental health service in a crowded online market place. Something that reflects the state-of-the-science, is hyper-individualized, and leaves the client with a skillset that they can use to improve their own life now and in the future.