This semester, Wellesley students will see new faces in the Stone Center and the Office of Student Wellness. The latest staff members who have been hired in the Division of Student Wellness include Athena Davos, a psychiatric nurse practitioner; Cynthia Song, a mental health clinician and cross cultural specialist; Allison Weinberg, the new Director of Student Wellness; and AJ Guerrero, coordinator of LGBTQ+ programs and services. The Wellesley News checked in with a few of them to see how their first weeks have gone and how they hope to improve and support the Welleslsey community.
Athena Davos
Before starting at Wellesley in January, Athena Davos obtained her nursing degree from Simmons College, followed by a master’s in psychiatric nursing from Northeastern University. Her clinical focus was initially in veteran patients and she previously worked in the Boston VA Healthcare System, although she recently transitioned to working with college students. Davos specializes in treatment of trauma-related disorders, depression and substance abuse disorders; her biography on the Stone Center staff directory states that she approaches one-on-one counseling “with an open and compassionate mind and works to tailor treatment to the specific needs of each client.” Before Wellesley, Davos also worked as a psychiatric nurse practitioner at Northeastern University Health and Counseling Services and Optum Health Services in Boston, which serves several local colleges and universities.
Allison Weinberg
Allison Weinberg comes to Wellesley from Lasell College, where she not only worked with students in the counseling center, but also managed the schoolwide health education program. She received her masters in Behavioral Medicine and Mental Health Counseling from Boston University and completed her clinical training with a focus on substance abuse recovery. Weinberg enjoys working with college students, who are a point in their lives when they “get to define for themselves what their values are and what matters to them most.” As the Director of Student Wellness since Jan. 6, she hopes to help students find balance and hopes to promote the message that academic rigor and personal wellbeing are not mutually exclusive. Weinberg also wants to branch out: “I am looking to collaborate with colleagues in curricular and co-curricular departments to identify ways in which we can better integrate wellness and resiliency models throughout campus,” she wrote in an email to The Wellesley News. After working one-on-one with students at Lasell College, Weinberg is excited to support student wellbeing on a more macro level.
Cynthia Song
Cynthia Song, a multicultural specialist and psychologist in the Stone Center since January, approaches her work “from an anti-oppressive/social justice framework, drawing from multicultural and relational psychoanalytic theories,” according to her biography on the counseling staff website. Song comes to Wellesley after receiving her doctorate in psychology from George Fox University and completing a clinical internship at Columbia University Medical Center, then a fellowship at Portland University Medical Center. Before that, she was a lawyer. It is important to Song to treat one-on-one therapy as a collaboration, which centers an individuals’s “upbringing, social context and life.” Song is especially interested in working to “embolden one’s sense of agency and increase cognitive and emotional flexibility for a more connected, compassionate, and creative sense of being with self and others.”
