Irvin S. Schonfeld

He is the recipient of Society for Occupational Health Psychology service award.

Biography

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Schonfeld spent his childhood in the Glenwood Houses, a housing project in the Flatlands section of the borough. His father, George Schonfeld, was a World War II veteran and his mother Ruth (née Berson) Schonfeld, worked part-time in a department store. Schonfeld is related to the writer Dayal Kaur Khalsa (née Marcia Schonfeld) and the expert and dealer in Impressionist paintings, Sam Salz. Schonfeld earned a B.S. in Psychology with a minor in Mathematics from Brooklyn College, and an M.A. in Psychology from The New School for Social Research, which he completed while teaching mathematics in the New York City public schools.

As a student, he was active in anti–Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movements and contributed as a writer for the underground campus newspaper Nova Vanguard. His activism drew the attention of the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Internal Security, which subpoenaed his college records. A letter he had written to The New York Times Magazine was later included in George Kennan’s Democracy and the Student Left.

He then earned his Ph.D. in developmental and educational psychology from the CUNY Graduate Center and completed postdoctoral training in epidemiology at Columbia University’s School of Public Health.

Academic career

Schonfeld began his academic career in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia where he served as a Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons from 1981 to 2010 and briefly as a Research Associate at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He became an assistant professor in the School of Education at The City College of New York (CCNY), advancing to full professor in 1994.

He subsequently held multiple appointments, including professor in the Department of Psychology at CCNY (2008–2021), Professor of Educational Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center (1998–2021), Professor of Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center (2002–2021), and Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the CUNY School of Public Health (2017–2021). He is currently a professor emeritus at CCNY and the CUNY Graduate Center.

A pivotal phase of Schonfeld’s formation was his post-doctoral fellowship in the Psychiatric Epidemiology Training Program at Columbia University’s School of Public Health (1983–1985), where he was mentored by Bruce P. Dohrenwend; that training catalyzed his shift away from developmental psychology toward research on work, stress, and mental health. In 2006, he founded the Newsletter of the Society for Occupational Health Psychology (serving until 2010) and served on the editorial board of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.