Kristina Scharp

Kristina Scharp, PhD

Kristina Scharp, PhD is a Professor of Communication at Rutgers University, a Director of the Family Communication and Relationships Lab, and Fellow of the International Association of Relationship Research. She is also the Principal Consultant at Scharp Consulting LLC. With over 120 scholarly journal articles and book chapters across her career, Dr. Scharp is one of the original and leading voices in the study of parent-child estrangement. For more than a decade, she has focused on understanding how adult children, parents, immediate family members, and grandparents navigate their changing identities, manage related stigma, uncertainty, and disclosure, as well as enact communication strategies to move forward. Her primary goal is translating her academic experience to helping real people make sense of and cope with all forms of family disconnection and distancing. Toward that end, she regularly engages with media outlets such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR.