Dr. Donn Posner is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He is the Director of Clinical Behavioral Medicine for Rhode Island and Miriam Hospitals and he is a certified insomnia specialist and Director of Behavioral Sleep Medicine for the Sleep Disorders Center of Lifespan Hospitals. He has spent the last 25 years treating Sleep and Anxiety Disorders in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Rhode Island Hospital, and has contributed considerably to its administrative leadership and research mission.
Over the last 20 years Dr. Posner has served as the primary supervisor for a rotation of the Behavioral Medicine track of the clinical psychology internship at Brown. The rotation focuses on the assessment and treatment of Sleep and Anxiety Disorders, and is one of the few rotations of its kind in the US. He also mentors post-doctoral fellows and lectures on Behavioral Sleep Medicine and Anxiety Disorders to interns, fellows, and residents in internal medicine and p sychiatry.
Dr. Posner is also one of the authors of Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Insomnia: A Session-by-Session Guide (New York: Springer/Verlag). The book is intended for clinical trainees, and non-insomnia sleep specialists, as well as more experienced clinicians from outside the sleep medicine field, who wish to learn how to provide empirically validated cognitive behavioral treatment for insomnia (CBT-I). He has been a consult- ant on one federally funded grant looking at the effect of CBT-I in patients who suffer from alcohol abuse and is currently consulting on another federally funded grant involving CBT-I in a cohort of veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Both grants used the book as a model for the clinical intervention protocol. He is currently a consultant for the Veteran’s Administration roll out of CBT-I and is training V A clinicians across the county in the implementation of this treatment.
Most recently Dr. Posner has been consulting around the country at clinical psychology programs and sleep centers assisting them on how to set up a Behavioral Sleep Medicine program and how to effectively deliver these treatments.