Dr. Kevin Volkan is a psychologist, writer, and educator with over twenty years of clinical, corporate, and academic experience. He currently serves Professor of Psychology at CI and was one of the founding faculty of the university.
Dr. Volkan teaches a number of different courses ranging from Asian philosophy to atypical psycho-pathologies. He is best known for his PSY 473 Bizarre Behaviors and Culture-Bound Syndromes and HIST-PSY 340 History & Psychology of Nazi Germany - which is co-taught with a historian.
Before coming to CSUCI, Dr. Volkan was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School where he researched ways to measure medical student and physician performance. While at Harvard, Dr. Volkan also taught for the prestigious Harvard-Macy Institute, a joint program run by the Harvard Business, Education, and Medical schools. In this program he taught medical students and physicians from Harvard as well as from all over the world.
Dr. Volkan’s background in psychology is wide-ranging and he takes a number of approaches to the field including: evolutionary, psychoanalytic, psychometric, and cognitive-behavioral. He is the author of a book on the psychology of drug addiction and numerous journal articles.
Along with a colleague, Dr. Volkan writes and maintains the Blog - BizarreBehaviors.com. He has testified as an expert on deviant behaviors before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and has made a number of television appearances as a behavioral expert.
Dr. Volkan worked as a clinical psychologist for a number of years. This experience included serving as staff psychologist at Agnews State Hospital in San Jose. There he worked with patients who demonstrated many severe behavioral problems, including profoundly autistic, psychotic, self-injurious, and developmentally disabled individuals. Dr. Volkan was awarded the Sustained Superior Accomplishment Award from the State of California for his clinical work.
Dr. Volkan also maintained a private practice in psychology in the San Francisco Bay Area. He grew up in Northern California and is an alumnus of both the University of California and California State University systems.
