Joan A. Muir, PhD, a Weston, Florida-based clinical psychologist, has been named a biographee of Marquis Who’s Who, according to an announcement dated August 27, 2026. The organisation also featured her on a 22-story digital screen in Times Square, a display reaching an estimated 1.5 million viewers daily.

Muir led the Brief Strategic Family Therapy Institute at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine as executive director from 2007 to 2025. The institute develops and promotes Brief Strategic Family Therapy, known as BSFT, a treatment model aimed at adolescents involved in substance use and delinquency. During her tenure, Muir built a dissemination plan that brought the model into community agencies across the United States and abroad, and she trained therapists to maintain fidelity to its protocols.

Her work took her beyond Miami. She coordinated with partners in New York and Stockholm, supervised practicum placements for University of Miami students, and helped launch BSFT programs in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico. In Stockholm, she secured a contract to bring BSFT to Maria Ungdom, a youth addiction treatment centre. In New York, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services funded an award for her to implement the model locally.

In December 2024, venture capital investors purchased the institute’s intellectual property from the University of Miami in a deal worth millions of dollars, a transaction intended to widen BSFT’s use internationally.

Before taking the executive director role, Muir spent six years, from 1998 to 2004, as an assistant research professor at the university, where she conducted clinical psychology research and mentored junior researchers. She has also run a private practice since 2000, and continues to see patients for several hours a week alongside her research and administrative work.

Muir immigrated to the United States from Jamaica. She earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Fordham University in 1989, completed a predoctoral fellowship at Yale University’s School of Medicine in 1993, and received her PhD from Fordham. She finished a postdoctoral fellowship in child psychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University, in 1995.

She belongs to the American Psychological Association and has served as national secretary and, previously, as South Florida chapter president of the Association of Black Psychologists. Since 2019, she has sat on the executive committee of the University of Miami’s Woodson Williams Marshall Association. Earlier civic work included the United Way Young Leaders Society and the Parent and Family Skills Task Force under a mayoral early childhood initiative.

Muir’s honors include the National Institute of Mental Health’s Minority Research Fellow Award, awarded through Columbia University’s child psychiatry department in 1999, and the Association of Black Psychologists South Florida chapter’s Healing Thru Leadership Award in 2025.

She has said the implementation model she built for BSFT, trademarked in collaboration with University of Miami attorneys, is the achievement she considers most significant in her career. Muir has said her interest in psychology began in high school in Jamaica, after reading “Dibs in Search of Self,” a book about play therapy.

She said she intends to keep expanding her practice to reach families regardless of income.