Origins and Mission

Origins of Sentio University

Sentio University was founded by Dr. Tony Rousmaniere and Dr. Alexandre Vaz to provide rigorous and intensive marriage and family therapy (MFT) training through a Deliberate Practice approach.

 Prior to founding the University, Dr. Rousmaniere and other scholars discovered that many graduate psychotherapy students were not gaining clinical effectiveness from their education and training, with some trainees even performing worse over time (Goldberg, Rousmaniere, et al., 2016; Owen, Wampold, Rousmaniere, Kopta, & Miller, 2016). Of all the training clinics examined by the researchers, only one demonstrated consistent improvement in trainee performance (Goldberg, Babins-Wagner, Rousmaniere, et al., 2016). What set this training program apart from its peers? Interviews with staff revealed that this singularly successful clinic employed an innovative training pedagogy called Deliberate Practice, a rigorous method of training that involves rehearsal within the trainees’ zone of proximal development, ongoing performance assessment, tailored goal-setting, and systematic skill-building informed by expert feedback (Ericsson & Pool, 2016).

For several years, Dr. Rousmaniere and Dr. Vaz trained professors at graduate programs in the United States and Europe to apply Deliberate Practice in their coursework. Over time, they saw that the best path forward would be a brand-new MFT graduate program, built from the ground-up on the principles of Deliberate Practice and clinical performance data. In 2020, Drs. Rousmaniere and Vaz founded Sentio University, a non-profit organization with the mission of advancing professional therapist training. To serve as a practicum site for Sentio students, they also founded the Sentio Counseling Center, an online training site that provides high-quality, low-fee counseling services to diverse and underserved California residents. Between 2020 and 2023, Drs. Rousmaniere and Vaz performed research, produced training books, and tested/refined the Sentio Supervision Model with practicum students from other graduate programs. After three years of intensive development, in Fall 2023 Sentio University starts admissions for its first cohort of students to start classes in Fall 2024.