Sarilee Kahn, daughter of Rita and Gilbert Kahn, has earned her doctorate from New York University’s Silver School of Social Work, where her qualitative research focused on the asylum-seeking and resettlement experiences of gay Muslim men and Muslim women subjected to female genital mutilation.
Based in New York City, Kahn is currently a trauma therapist and staff wellness consultant for international humanitarian organizations, providing crisis intervention, counseling and training for national and expatriate staff around the world. Current client organizations include Doctors of the World-USA, for which Kahn is co-director of the Psychosocial Care Unit, the International Rescue Committee, and American Jewish World Service. Kahn has been deployed to several high-stress environments, including Liberia, Afghanistan and Iraq to provide psychological first aid to national and international staff in the aftermath of traumatic events.
Kahn began her work with humanitarian organizations in 1994, when she served as coordinator of a psychosocial program for internally displaced children and families in Bosnia for the International Medical Corps. In 1997, she returned to Bosnia — with Physicians for Human Rights — to develop psychosocial programs for communities during exhumations of mass graves in the aftermath of the massacre at Srebrenica. She held similar roles with Physicians for Human Rights during exhumations in Kosovo, Cyprus and Greece.
From 1999-2008, she served as director of the Cross-Cultural Counseling Center at the International Institute of New Jersey, where she helped launch the Institute’s Program for Survivors of Torture, and launched New Jersey’s first statewide Anti-Human Trafficking initiative.
