Judith Lessing Landau

is the Founder and President of Linking Human Systems, LLC and LINC Foundation is a child, family, and community neuropsychiatrist. Former professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of Rochester, she has devoted her career to developing Evidence-Based, Best Practice collaborative family and community resilience models. Former faculty member of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and Senior Consultant to the International Trauma Studies Program at NYU and Columbia, Dr. Landau draws upon 50+ years of research and experience aimed at facilitating long-term healing for individuals, families, and communities dealing with chronic, relapsing behavioral, mental, and physical health issues and addiction. (www.linkinghumansystems.com).

Dr. Landau enjoys overcoming challenging patient, family, business, forensic and community issues, and unraveling complex systems. Her passion is overcoming racial injustice and improving the living situations of disadvantaged communities. She served as the primary consultant to the Judiciary in South Africa on issues of domestic violence and, working as a District Surgeon, was responsible for all inner city, prison and police forensic issues and violence.

As a child, growing up before and during the oppression and violence of Apartheid, she was enveloped in the closeness of her community of family and non-blood family and experienced the protective nature of relational resilience. This became the heart of her life’s mission: helping people realize their inherent resilience and the importance of connectedness to family, culture, and spirituality as protection from trauma.

Based on her relational resilience research, Dr. Landau with University of Rochester faculty, developed the Evidence-Based, Best-Practice Transitional Family Therapy (TFT), the first integrative model of family therapy. Evidence-Based interventions at individual, family, and community level based on TFT include LINC Community Resilience, ARISE Comprehensive Care with Invitational Intervention, a method for engaging and treating addicted individuals and their families, and LIFE, applied to reducing intimate partner violence, STDs/HIV/AIDS, and addiction in inner city and minority women. She took early retirement to apply these methods in the “real world.” She has conducted numerous country and state-wide community interventions, executive and business interventions, and a few thousand individual and family interventions.

Author and co-author of over 200 peer-reviewed publications and books, she has taught in numerous countries, and trained several thousand trainers, therapists, and interventionists. Her ground-breaking book, AIDS, Health and Mental Health, won the international Choice Library award. Dr. Landau has been principal investigator on research conducted through WHO, NIDA, NIAAA, SAMHSA and EAR. She has consulted to UN, WHO (most recently to the Public Health section about communities dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic), NIMH, NIDA, NIAAA, SAMHSA, CDC & P, national and international universities, and several international governments including Argentina, South Africa, Hong Kong, Hungary, Brazil, Taiwan, countries in former Yugoslavia (most recently Kosovo), and to a United States Congressional Committee on prevention of consequences of mass disaster. She currently serves as a consultant to the WHO Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Geneva and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation Section (PTRS). Vienna. She is a frequent consultant to treatment centers, colleagues, clients, families, and family businesses around the world.

A Senior Fulbright Visiting Scholar, and Fellow of Orthopsychiatry, Association, AAMFT and NCFR, she is the recipient of awards for AAMFT’s Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Marriage and Family Therapy and AFTA’s Innovative Contribution to Family Therapy. She is past president of the International Family Therapy Association (IFTA) and has served on numerous editorial boards, and national and international association boards. She has been listed in Who’s Who in the World since 1999, in Science and Engineering since 1998, Medicine and Healthcare since 2002, and holds the 2018 Albert Nelson Marquis  Lifetime Achievement Award.

Currently recognized as a global addiction and trauma pioneer, Dr. Landau continues to change the future of addiction and its interface with mental and physical health by identifying trauma that spans generations. Her TEDX talk, Family Stories, Secrets and Survival, has become legendary and is one of the most sought-after presentations on the subjects of: family resilience, trauma, addiction, and mental health. Steadily working on her personal memoir, Dr. Landau continues to be relied upon by the national media as an expert on all stories relating to human behavior. She is also a “Sangoma” or traditional African healer and a member of 4 Winds Indigenous Healers, an organization committed to bridging traditional wisdom and western science.