Contact Dr. Giunta
301-565-0093
drgiunta@giunta-associates.com
Academic Credentials
- Licensed Psychologist in Maryland, District of Columbia & West Virginia
- Licensed Clinical Psychologist in Virginia
- Ph.D., Clinical Psychology, University of Vermont
- Predoctoral Internship, San Francisco VA Medical Center
- B.S., Psychology, University of Washington
Throughout her training and professional life, Dr. Giunta has had a strong interest in psychological assessment. It is her commitment to making psychological assessment results accessible and useful which guides the philosophy of this practice.
Throughout her professional career, Dr. Giunta has been retained frequently as an expert to conduct forensic evaluations to shed light on mental health issues as they relate to a broad range of legal questions. Dr. Giunta has consulted on nearly a thousand civil and criminal matters in state and federal courts and frequently provides expert testimony.
Since graduate school, Dr. Giunta has devoted a considerable portion of her professional time to conducting neuropsychological evaluations, particularly with the elderly, both in private practice and through consultations in eldercare facilities. She enjoys working collaboratively with geriatricians, geriatric care managers and other professionals to ensure that conditions of late life are adequately understood and managed. Dr. Giunta lectures frequently on dementia and other conditions of late life, including training attorneys on mental health issues commonly seen in alleged disabled adults.
Dr. Giunta’s interest in educational evaluation is a natural outgrowth of her concentration in psychological testing and assessment. For more than twenty years, she has conducted and/or supervised psychoeducational evaluations.
Training: Dr. Giunta’s graduate training included concentrations in assessment and neuropsychology, geriatrics and forensic psychology. She trained in a broad range of settings, including a college counseling center, a state psychiatric hospital, a medical teaching hospital, and an outpatient clinic. She completed a pre-doctoral internship at the San Francisco VA Medical Center where her training focused on psychological assessment, treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and inpatient treatment of substance abuse.
Experience: After completing her Ph.D., Dr. Giunta worked as a staff psychologist at John Howard Pavilion, the maximum security inpatient forensic facility at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. Her work in that setting focused primarily on pre-release assessments and neuropsychological evaluations as well as competency and criminal responsibility evaluations.
Concurrently, Dr. Giunta worked in private practice under the supervision of Dr. Christine Courtois. In that setting, Dr. Giunta specialized in the treatment of psychological trauma and post abuse sequelae, including complex post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder.
Since 1995, Dr. Giunta has been in full-time private practice specializing in assessment and consultation. Her practice focuses on forensic, neuropsychological, and educational evaluations. Additional professional services have included consulting at area nursing homes, overseeing psychological assessment at a wilderness program for teens and at a therapeutic boarding school for girls as well as training graduate students in assessment at George Washington University.