Amy Johnson, EdD, MAT, MA, LPC, CPDT-KA is the former and founding Director of the Center for Human Animal Interventions at Oakland University. She developed and implemented the online Animal Assisted Therapy Certificate Program at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, which began in 2007 and created and taught a course through the Honors College at Oakland University on the Human Animal Bond and Animal Assisted Therapy. She currently teaches an AAI course at the University of Chester (UK). Additionally, she developed and implemented an AAI that pairs adjudicated, at-risk and homeless youth with hard-to-adopt rescue dogs for a multi week, intensive therapeutic intervention called “Teacher’s Pet: Dogs and Kids Learning Together” (Michigan). From 2012-2014, she was co-PI on an NIHCD (Mars/Waltham) R03 study with Wayne State University (Detroit) that measured the efficacy of the AAI (Teacher’s Pet) at two residential detention facilities. She was also instrumental in getting the Competencies accepted and endorsed by the American Counseling Association (ACA) and is the co-facilitator of the ACA’s Human Animal Interventions in Counseling Interest Network and is a board member at large of the American Psychological Association’s Human Animal Interactions Section.
