Professor of Medical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University Medical Center

      At Duke, I help to run the Center for Developmental Epidemiology, in conjunction with its Director, Adrian Angold MRCPsych. The Center brings together researchers from different disciplines in order to advance our understanding of the origins, course, and prevention of mental illness across the life course. My own program of empirical and theoretical work has increased my conviction that child psychiatric epidemiology has no option but to incorporate developmental science if it is to carry out its mission of understanding, treating, and preventing the psychiatric disorders of childhood and adolescence (and in the process, perhaps, also relieving some of the burden of adult disorders). We are only beginning to understand what it will take, in terms both of conceptualization and empirical research programs, to integrate developmental and epidemiologic research.

     In my work as an epidemiologist I am using the data sets to which I have access through the Center for Developmental Epidemiology to develop a model of child psychopathology that will help us to integrate findings about the causes of mental illness ("etiologic epidemiology") with a better understanding of risk factors and the options for prevention ("public health epidemiology"). An important aim for me is to use findings from this work as the basis for developing a set of propositions about how public health can use a primary care/primary prevention model to improve the emotional and behavioral development of children.

     I am currently directing the eighth annual wave of data collection for the Great Smoky Mountains Study, a longitudinal study of the development of psychiatric and substance abuse disorders and access to mental health care, in a representative sample of 1400 children and adolescents living in the southeastern United States.