When my youngest child went
off to college in Fall 2000, I took a full-time college teaching
job at Niagara County Community College (NCCC) where I currently
teach a variety of psychology courses. My personal and professional
interests have always included animals, having taken the "dog"
course with Michael Fox, Ph.D., D.V.M. at Washington University
in St. Louis my first year in grad school. One of my dogs,
BoB the DoG was a natural for nursing home visits and that
is what led me to PAN and AAT. (BoB was selected as Western
New York Nursing Home Volunteer of the Year, adult division
during his visiting career.) I enrolled in the PAN course
in 2001, with the goal of studying the Human Animal Bond to
design a course for my community college, which has students
in nursing, animal management, human service, criminal justice,
education and psychology among other majors.
To make a long story short…I currently
still teach psychology at NCCC full time, I have been the
Resource Coordinator for Society and Animals Forum formerly
PSYETA (Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)
since October 2001. In the Fall of 2002 I offered for the
first time at my college, a course in Human Animal Relations.
In spring semester 2006 the first on-line version of that
course will run. It is open to students from all over the
world and is now approved for Social Science General Education
credit at the State University of New York (SUNY System) about
which I am very excited. I have completed with Dave Anderson,
my daughter Alexandra, who is a sociology grad student at
Stanford University and Debbie Coultis, PAN CEO, a study analyzing
historical and sociological patterns of doctoral dissertations
done in Human Animal Studies for the last two decades. The
paper was published in the Tenth Anniversary Issue vol.10,
no. 4 of Society and Animals.
In 2002, I was elected to ISAZ, the International
Society for Anthrozoology. I served on the ISAZ Board of Directors
for 2 years and coordinated the 2005 ISAZ conference which
was held in Niagara Falls, NY. My main areas of research are
in the field of animal abuse and cruelty and research methods
in the study of human animal relations, in particular AAI.
You can contact Dr. Gerbasi via e-mail
at kcgerbasiphd@earthlink.net
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