She is a psychotherapist, researcher, speaker, and author in the San Francisco Bay Area who specializes in mindfulness-based work with adolescents. She is founder of Stressed Teens, which has been offering mindfulness-based stress reduction for teens (MBSR-T) to adolescents, families, schools, professionals, and the community since 2004. She created MBSR-T to help teens in a large HMO’s outpatient department of child and adolescent psychiatry whose physical and psychological symptoms were not responding satisfactorily to a multitude of other evidence-based practices.

She is an expert and pioneer of bringing mindfulness-based approaches to youth. She is the author of the Take in the Good: Skills for Staying Positive & Living Your Best Life, The Stress Reduction Card Deck for Teens: 52 Essential Mindfulness Skills, The Self-Harm Workbook for Teens: Mindfulness skills to help teens overcome cutting and self-harming behaviors, thoughts, and feelings; Be Mindful & Stress Less: 50 Ways to Deal with Your (Crazy) Life; Mindfulness for Student Athletes: A Workbook to Help Teens Reduce Stress and Enhance Performance; The Stress Reduction Workbook for Teens: Mindfulness Skills to Help You Deal with Stress (first and second edition); and Be Mindful: A Card Deck for Teens.She also has a mindfulness practice audio CD, Mindfulness for Teens: Mindfulness Practices to Reduce Stress and Promote Well-Being to complement the MBSR-T program. She provides worldwide multi-day trainings and intensive ten-week online trainings and works with teens and families individually and in groups. Her work has been featured on the Today Show, CNN, Psychology Today, Reuters, the New York Times, and Tricycle to name a few.

She is a writer, editor, teen/young adult transition coach, and mindfulness (MBSR-T) and Pilates instructor. She currently works privately with teens and young adults in Orange County, CA and virtually as well using mindfulness and strengths-based approaches to life coaching and serves as the Outreach and Transition Coach for Stressed Teens.

Dr. Cooper earned both master’s and doctoral degrees in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University and has 16 years of experience as a counselor and coach with youth and young adults to help them explore, grow, earn, create, overcome, hope, and dream (e.g., Duke University’s student counseling center, Long Beach Job Corps, and an inpatient adolescent psychiatric ward in Los Angeles). Her doctoral dissertation was on the role of hope in therapy, and her enthusiasm for strengths-based approaches and prevention as well as working with adolescent girls led her to pursue a career in life coaching. As a certified instructor of MBSR-T and co-author of The Mindfulness Workbook for Self-Harm: Skills to Help You Overcome Cutting and Self-Harming Behaviors, Thoughts, and Feelings, she has led MBSR-T workshops both in middle school, high school, and community center settings in Orange County as well as online with Gina Biegel through Stressed Teens. She has also presented to parents and teens in her community on topics related to mindfulness, stress management, self-esteem, and identity.

Additionally, she is associate of the International Positive Psychology Association and has supported Girls Incorporated of Orange County since 2015 as a volunteer, career panelist/motivational speaker, keynote speaker for the Eureka summer camp for girls, and student mentor. She teaches Pilates, has been an academic and scientific editor/proofreader since 2009, and published a fiction novel (The Masks We Wear).