Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University Medical Center

        I have worked closely with Adrian Angold and E. Jane Costello since completing a research fellowship with the Developmental Epidemiology Program. Prior to my faculty appointment, I attended Yale College and Yale Medical School and completed my adult and child psychiatry residency training at Duke.

      My research with the Center for Developmental Epidemiology has included secondary analysis of GSMS and CCCs, the longitudinal, population-based data sets gathered on children and adolescents in rural and urban North Carolina. Using the data from these studies, I have focused on somatic complaints and psychopathology, the presentation of and course of anxiety disorders, and school refusal. More recently, I have been working on the development of a new psychiatric interview for parents of preschool children, the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment (PAPA).

      The PAPA is the first comprehensive, developmentally appropriate structured psychiatric interview to examine the presentation of psychopathology, family and community risk factors, and resiliency and protective factors in both population-based and clinical cohorts of preschoolers. Designed to assess psychiatric symptoms, disorders, functioning and impairment in preschoolers, data obtained using the PAPA will contribute to the development of a reliable psychiatric nosology for preschool children.

      My interest in studying preschool children within a longitudinal, population-based framework stems from a belief that the earlier that we can identify the early signs and symptoms of psychiatric disorders and define the course of childhood psychiatric disorders, the better we will be at understanding how to intervene to modify the presentation and/or progression of these illnesses. The PAPA will be used at the Center in our on-site laboratory later this year.