Dr. Allan Zuckoff is a clinical psychologist and an internationally recognized expert in motivational interviewing. He has provided professional MI training in the US, Europe, and Oceania for practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines and settings. (See the Experience page for a select list of trainings Dr. Zuckoff has provided.)
Dr. Zuckoff joined the international Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT) in 1998. From 2008-2014 and 2020-2022 he served on MINT's Board of Directors, including three years as Chair of the Board and four years as Treasurer. He was Editor of Motivational Interviewing: Training, Research, Implementation, Practice (MITRIP), MINT's open-access online journal (2010-2015), and its predecessor, the MINT Bulletin (2003-2009). He has been chair of MINT's Trainer Development and Certification and Practitioner Certification committees, a member of the Organizing Committee of the Sixth International Conference on Motivational Interviewing (ICMI 2022) and the Planning Committees for the 2006 and 2007 MINT Forums, and co-leader of MINT's annual Training of New Trainers, the training required for MINT membership.
From 2001-2015 Dr. Zuckoff was a member of the departments of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, where his research focused on development and testing of applications of motivational interviewing. He developed and manualized the interventions and directed the training and quality assurance of clinicians in studies of MI for adherence to treatment by adults with co-occurring mood and substance use disorders; engagement in depression treatment by mothers of psychiatrically ill children, pregnant women, and patients in primary care; adherence to behavior therapy in adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder; pregnancy and STD prevention and smoking cessation in adolescents; HIV risk reduction in high-risk men and women; and resolution of residual ambivalence in living organ donors. He was a co-investigator in the Mental Health Interventions Research Center for Mood and Anxiety Disorders and the Research Network Development Core of the Advanced Center for Interventions and Services Research for Late-Life Mood Disorders. Dr. Zuckoff published more than 40 papers and chapters and presented at numerous national and international conferences related to this work. (See the Publications page for a list of his publications.) In 2016 Dr. Zuckoff became Director of Training and then Vice President, Clinical Program Development at Vital Decisions, a provider of MI-based telehealth advance care planning services for people with advanced ilness. In 2021 Vital Decisions was acquired by Evolent, a health services company specializing in complex care; Dr. Zuckoff remained in his role, with expanded responsibilities for developing programs for advanced illness and oncology patient navigation, through 2024.
Dr. Zuckoff draws on diverse clinical experiences in his MI training. He was on staff from 1993-2002 at the Center for Psychiatric and Chemical Dependency Services of Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic (WPIC), serving as a clinician, clinical supervisor, and co-director of training. He received training and supervision in time-limited psychodynamic psychotherapy as a therapist in the National Institute of Drug Abuse Collaborative Cocaine Addiction Treatment Study between 1992-1997 and provided motivational interviewing interventions in several research studies between 1997-2002. In 2000 he was invited by director Katherine Shear, MD to join WPIC's Panic, Anxiety, and Complicated Grief Treatment Research program to integrate MI into the newly developed cognitive-behavioral Complicated Grief Treatment (CGT). He provided CGT in its first randomized controlled trial, co-led trainings in CGT with Dr. Shear, and developed an adaptation of CGT for persons with co-occurring substance use disorders. (CGT is now known as Prolonged Grief Disorder Treatment; for more information, visit the website of the Center for Prolonged Grief.) He also spent several years providing assessment and treatment of depressed older adults in WPIC's Late Life Depression Treatment Research Center, becoming certified in interpersonal psychotherapy and problem-solving therapy. In his time at Vital Decisions and Evolent, Dr. Zuckoff provided advance care planning and care navigation support to people with cancer, heart disease, and other life-limiting illnesses as part of his intervention development and quality assurance responsibilities.
Dr. Zuckoff's ground-breaking MI self-help book (with Bonnie J. Gorscak, PhD), Finding Your Way to Change: How the Power of Motivational Interviewing Can Reveal What You Want and Help You Get There, was published in 2015 by The Guilford Press and is available in English, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. He is also co-author of Improving Treatment Compliance: Counseling and Systems Strategies for Substance Abuse and Dual Disorders (with Dennis C. Daley, PhD) and several chapters in Guilford's "Applications of Motivational Interviewing" series (Stephen Rollnick, PhD, William R. Miller, PhD, and Theresa B. Moyers, PhD, series editors).
