Student Spotlight: Ignatius Chen

Ignatius Chen, a fourth-year student in the Wright Institute’s Clinical Psychology program, was born and raised in Michigan. “Both sets of my grandparents were born in China and ended up fleeing China for Taiwan during the Communist Revolution, which is where my parents were born,” he shared. “My parents didn’t know each other in Taiwan, but they ended up both going to university in Michigan and met there.” After Ignatius and his younger sister were born, their parents decided to stay in Michigan and raise their children there.

For his undergraduate studies, Ignatius attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, where he graduated with a BA in Chemical Engineering and Biology in 2013. “I was really drawn to engineering, and at MIT you can get a joint degree in both biology and chemical engineering, so I ended up doing both,” Ignatius shared. “The applications after college were pretty interesting to me, and I was offered a lot of really cool opportunities while I was there.” While at MIT, Ignatius worked at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT with the Human Genome Project and in the CRISPR gene-editing lab, studying infectious diseases and their influence on human behavior.

Ignatius’s time at MIT also taught him that humans are integral to just about every technological system. For his undergraduate thesis, he studied biomimetics, which involves solving complex human problems by replicating the models found in nature. “Just like a fingerprint is unique to each person, biomimetics looks at the ways humans move that are unique to you,” Ignatius explained. “For example, if I were typing on a keyboard, I would have a different typing cadence and frequency than you would have. Even if you used my keyboard, I could tell the difference between the two of us by the way that I moved my fingers, the pauses and speed, and even the mistakes that were frequently made.” The idea behind the field of biomimetics is that there's always a human element in our interactions with technology, so Ignatius became increasingly interested in psychology as well.

From 2013-2017, Ignatius worked in consulting in New York City in the quantitative risk management department. “My initial interest in cyber security was an extension of my biomimetics research,” he shared. “The idea is that, if you can imprint human behavior, then you can use it to make decisions on how to assess risks and safeguard technology.” Ignatius spent much of his time there building risk assessment models for financial services clients. “Unfortunately, human error is a huge component of the risk companies face,” he explained. “You can have the most secure system in the world, but if the humans that are interacting with it are not well trained and you don't have good policies in place,, no amount of technology is going to safeguard you from someone overriding the security systems in place.” Eventually, Ignatius also worked on financial risk models, including collaborating with the Federal Reserve to develop credit-liquidity models to limit-test how much credit risk banks could safely take on, in order to prevent another financial crisis.

In 2017, Ignatius left NYC and moved to the San Diego area. “In New York City, it's easy to get caught up in the work culture and then just stay there and keep progressing in your career,” he reflected. “I just felt like there was something more to my life that was missing.” Ignatius became very interested in Ashtanga yoga while living in New York, so he decided to move to San Diego to study with Tim Miller, one of the first Americans to practice it. “When I was in New York, I was looking at my managers who were working every single day, and their lives were kind of a mess - they made a lot of money, but they worked a lot, and I felt like that was not a road that I wanted to go down,” he explained. “Then I looked at my teacher, Tim Miller, and his life was full of love and joy and real solid human connections, so I felt like if I just practiced yoga with him every day, that my life could move more in that direction.”

At the same time, Ignatius worked for a machine learning/AI startup in Carlsbad, CA, where he served as Director of Business Intelligence and Data Analytics until 2022. “It was a big change from corporate life to the small startup culture,” he recalled. “When I joined, I was the thirtieth employee, and by the time I left, they had over five hundred employees across the globe.” In San Diego, Ignatius worked with digital publishers to study user behavior and, later, user intention, in an effort to improve the user experience and maximize profits.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ignatius began studying with a Japanese Zen Buddhist meditation group. “With everything slowed down, I felt a lot more need for stillness, so instead of the movement and breathing of yoga, I wanted more seated meditation and silent contemplation,” he reflected. “I ended up becoming a lay student practitioner, and I was lay-ordained by my teacher.” Because his work was remote at the time, Ignatius was able to join several silent meditation retreats at his teacher’s monastery in New Mexico. “As part of my training, my teacher encouraged me to volunteer, and one thing she really wanted me to work on was to come to an understanding behind the meanings of life and death,” he explained. “She gave me a bunch of suggestions, and one of them was hospice.” Ignatius volunteered for Hospice East Bay for almost two years, providing companionship and caretaker relief to patients and their family members.

Around this time, a friend from college who was an instructor for a non-profit called the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) told Ignatius about a Wilderness EMT course they were offering. Because he had been on many backpacking and mountaineering expeditions, including to Mount Everest base camp in Nepal, this course appealed to Ignatius. “I've spent enough time in the backcountry deep in the mountains to get myself in a couple of sticky situations,” he reflected. “So I've always wanted to learn how to take care of myself and a team out there.” The course involved a one-month expedition during which participants learned to administer emergency first aid in the wilderness, build shelters from logs and foliage, craft splints from sleeping bags and backpacks, and acquire many other invaluable skills. From 2022-2024, Ignatius was a search-and-rescue volunteer with the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Department, keeping his skills sharp while supporting his community.

In the fall of 2022, Ignatius enrolled in the Clinical Psychology program at the Wright Institute. He had looked at programs nationally, but was glad to find the program that was the best fit for him near home in Berkeley. “I really liked the psychodynamic orientation of the Wright Institute, which is becoming rarer in programs these days,” he explained. “Having come from a science background, I wanted more of the humanistic touch.” Ignatius chose to pursue a doctoral degree rather than a master’s degree primarily because he was interested in working in institutions such as state hospitals and prisons, and because of his interest in psychological assessment.

Ignatius’s first two practicum experiences were at the Wright Institute Recovery Clinic and at Lomi Psychotherapy Clinic. “The Recovery Clinic was a great place to get started,” he reflected. “It was interesting to be with clients, not knowing a whole lot, and realize that, similarly to hospice work, just your presence is able to help people.” Ignatius loved being able to jump right into practicum in his first year and found he could apply what he learned in class as he went along. “At Lomi, they worked a lot with the body, which felt really aligned with the psychodynamic view I have. Also, I learned from yoga and meditation that there’s no separation between the mind and the body,” he explained. “Somatic therapy, where you include the body, gestures, and movements, was really aligned with the way I think about therapy.”

For his third-year practicum experience, Ignatius worked at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (SQRC) as a psychological trainee. “I wanted to work with people who were really struggling and suffering,” he reflected. “A lot of people find prisons scary or uncomfortable, and they turn away from that population, but a big part of my Buddhist meditation practice is to turn towards people’s suffering rather than away,” he explained. “It takes a tremendous amount of courage for my clients to relate to their sadness, to relate to their fear, to relate to their grief, but eventually things start to move again.” After his previous experiences in community mental health, it was challenging to adjust to working as a small component of such a huge system. “Our patients had a whole care team, for better or for worse, and sometimes they had different views about trauma and patient care than we would,” he recalled. “For some members of the team, their job was to maintain the safety of the institution, while our job was to try and help our patients psychologically.” While at San Quentin, Ignatius connected with the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, a civilian nonprofit organization that works with Asians and Asian-Americans who are incarcerated. One of his proudest moments was presenting in the prison to a class taught by the organization and demonstrating to Asian inmates that there are people who represent them, understand them, and can help them in the field of mental health.

During his third year, Ignatius also completed a supplemental practicum at Partnerships for Trauma Recovery (PTR), where he provided trauma therapy to refugees and asylum-seekers. “PTR has a center for survivors of torture, so all of their patients have experienced torture as a part of a system and they're seeking asylum or refugee status as a result of that torture,” he explained. “For most of them, English isn't their first language, they're heavily marginalized, and they've had unspeakable things happen to them - they're trying to figure out how to survive, and they're really looking for help.” Completing this practicum concurrently with his work at San Quintin was emotionally very heavy for Ignatius, especially because some of the inmates he worked with at San Quintin were perpetrators of the same crimes his patients at PTR were victims of.

This year, Ignatius has been hard at work on his dissertation, titled Decolonizing Mindfulness: Recentering Zen Buddhist Narratives in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). “Given my parents’ and grandparents’ diaspora, I'm really interested in how colonized cultures and specifically religions are appropriated,” he shared. Looking at DBT therapy in particular, Ignatius noticed that practitioners were encouraged to teach mindfulness techniques to their clients without any understanding of the background behind those practices. “Having done both the psychology aspect and the Buddhist meditation aspect, realizing that those things are different and that when you translate a practice outside of its context and structure, it takes on subtle, sometimes conscious but also unconscious goals,” he explained. “When we move Buddhist mindfulness away from the Buddhist practices of meditation and renunciation and move them to psychology for the betterment of an individual, a lot is lost in that translation.”

There are two professors at the Wright Institute who Ignatius would consider mentors: Dr. Philip Keddy and Dr. Ania Wertz. In addition to having Dr. Keddy as his assessment instructor, Ignatius has worked for the last three years in his private practice, assisting with adult collaborative therapeutic assessments and civil forensic evaluations. This year, he also served as a teaching assistant for Dr. Keddy’s adult assessment course. “I really like how he can take something like an assessment that seems really dry and bring in relational aspects,” he shared. “ I appreciate his willingness to connect those two and to take the psychodynamic processes that we learn about in intervention and apply them in assessment.” Dr. Wertz taught Ignatius’s first year Intervention: Psychodynamic Theory course and later became his dissertation chair. He appreciates her history background and the way she’s able to help contextualize their learning and think outside the box. “I learned so much from Dr. Wertz because she really helped cultivate an appreciation for the ideographic traditions and historical foundations that have shaped the discipline of psychology,” Ignatius explained.

Despite his success, the road to his doctoral degree has not been without its challenges for Ignatius. He found that returning to school to begin a new career meant his needs, both professional and personal, often differed from those of many of his classmates, and he had to self-advocate to ensure they were met. If Ignatius could give one piece of advice to future students at the Wright Institute, it would be to come in with a very open mind. “The most valuable lesson I've learned is that you just never know where people are coming from, whether that’s another student, faculty, or your patients, so come in with a very open mind,” he reflected. “My advice would be to always be open to being surprised and be willing to be inspired and also to inspire others.”

Beginning this fall, Ignatius will complete his internship at Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security forensic state hospital on California's Central Coast. “For a lot of patients, state hospitals are their first encounter with actual rehabilitation and care,” he explained. “It’s a little damning about the state of public mental health care in California and in the United States in general, but often you have to have severe enough symptoms and have committed a crime to actually receive care from the state.” Ignatius is eager to learn more about the state hospital system and is particularly interested in Atascadero because of its work in rehabilitation without sedation or restraints. “I really want to work with people who I think a lot of society has given up on - that’s often how they’ve ended up in these state facilities,” he reflected. “That really aligns with my personal and spiritual interests of caring for everybody.”

After completing his degree at the Wright Institute, Ignatius is interested in pursuing a career in criminal forensic psychology. “I want to split my time between working as a forensic evaluator and individual therapy,” he shared. “I became a therapist because I want to sit with individuals, couples, and families, so I will always have individual therapy in my career.” Ignatius hopes to help his clients put their experiences into words and support them in obtaining results that are both what they want and, when possible, what is best for them. “For a lot of people who are impaired, it's difficult to make their own decisions, and the state needs to make a decision on their behalf,” he explained. “They need evaluators to help them get the information that they need in order to make the best decision that they can, and it’s not always a clear-cut answer.” Thankfully, Ignatius has been well-trained to manage uncertainty and focus on achieving the best outcomes for his clients, so he is more than prepared for the challenge.