Faculty

Vice Chief, Department of Psychiatry Clinical Operations, Chief
Chief, Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

Dr. Venter hails from South Africa and completed his Child and Adolescent Psychiatry training at CHA and a child and adolescent neuropsychiatry research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. He has held a number of positions at CHA including Director of Intensive Services. His clinical interests include autism, trauma, early-onset psychosis and mitochondrial disorders. Most recently he has served as Division Chief of Psychiatry at Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Arizona. He obtained his certification as a physician executive in 2013, and stepped into the role of Division Chief of Child Psychiatry at CHA in 2016. He became Vice Chief of Clinical Operations for the Department of Psychiatry in early 2020.

Assistant Professor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Director, Child & Adolescent Outpatient Psychiatry
Clinical Research Associate, Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research/Health Equity Research Lab

Dr. Carson is a graduate of the child psychiatry fellowship at Cambridge Health Alliance and completed residency training in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in the Clinical Research Scholars Program. His research in mental health services for multicultural communities has explored the quality and social determinants of mental health outcomes across children and adults using electronic health record and national survey data. He was a co-investigator on several NIMH, AHRQ, and PCORI-funded grants on topics of patient provider communication, mechanisms of health care disparities, and shared decision making. Currently, Dr. Carson is focused on suicide prevention research using innovative big data approaches among disadvantaged youth. Dr. Carson leads the Clinical Scholarship seminar for second-year fellows, precepts the second-year psychopharmacology clinic, and is a Team Leader on the Friday Evaluation Team. He was the Associate Training Director of the Child Psychiatry Fellowship Program from July 2013-June 2016 before assuming the role of Medical Director for the Child and Adolescent Outpatient Psychiatry Services in July of 2016.

Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Director, Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research and Health Equity Research Lab

Dr. Cook holds a PhD in Health Policy from Harvard University and is a health services researcher focused on reducing and understanding underlying mechanisms of racial/ethnic disparities in health and mental health care. He has been principal investigator on several major R01 grants from the NIMH and AHRQ investigating mechanisms underlying disparities in episodes of mental health care, a R01 Supplement developing state by state report cards on mental health care disparities and a Milton Foundation grant supporting research on tobacco use and mental health. His methodological work focuses on improving statistical methods for the measurement and tracking of healthcare disparities, and he has received awards from NIMH and AcademyHealth for this work. His other research interests include improving mental health of immigrant populations, comparative effectiveness research and its influence on healthcare disparities, substance abuse treatment disparities and healthcare equity. Dr. Cook and his team teach the first-year fellows about health disparity research and provides mentorship on research methods and analysis to fellows and faculty interested in pursuing quantitative research studies.

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Senior Consultant to the Training Program, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Dr. DeJong trained in General Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, MA, and in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Massachusetts General and McLean Hospitals. She has worked in an outpatient community hospital setting providing consultations and medication management to patients referred from pediatricians, as well as inpatient child psychiatry consultation and private practice. In addition, she served as co-Investigator with Dr. Jean Frazier on an NIMH-funded multi-site research project in the treatment of early-onset psychosis, and has written about the use of antipsychotic medications in children. In the fall of 2004, Dr. DeJong assumed the position of Associate Training Director in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and became Training Director in July, 2013. Current academic interests include telepsychiatry, training on the treatment of substance use disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, e-professionalism and integrating technology into clinical practice, ethics in child psychiatry, and psychiatric education. She is the author of Blogs and Tweets, Texting and Friending: Social Media and the Internet in Health Care published by Elsevier in 2014. She serves on the Steering Committee and the Executive Council of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatry Training (AADPRT), and is the past-president of AADPRT. She currently also serves on the Ethics Committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. She participated in the 2014 ACGME Subspecialty Milestones Taskforce to develop Milestones for Child/Adolescent Psychiatry and as Editor of the Child Psychiatry Resident In-Training Examination (PRITE). She is currently serving in her second term as Secretary for the American Psychiatric Association (APA). She stepped into the Senior Associate Training Director role in July 2017, and stepped into her current role as senior consultant in July 2018.

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Director of Community Minority Affairs
Director of Medical Student Education, Child Psychiatry

Dr. Johnson-Bhembe completed a General Psychiatry residency at the Medical University of South Carolina and her child training at The Cambridge Hospital. Upon completing her child training in 2000, she worked as a staff psychiatrist on the Child Assessment Unit. Dr. Johnson-Bhembe was the Associate Director of Training for the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Training Program until 2004. She has worked as a community child psychiatrist for underserved populations in Massachusetts for her entire career, and worked as a consultant to the Cambridge and Malden Public School systems. She is the Director of Medical Student Education for Child Psychiatry and the Director of Community Minority Affairs. Dr. Johnson-Bhembe’s interests led her to create a biracial girls group focusing on the challenges facing teenage girls around identity formation. Her other interests include consulting to community organizations and exploring the issues around diagnosing children with both medical and psychiatric disorders.

Professor of Psychology, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Lyons-Ruth’s work has focused on the assessment of attachment relationships in high-risk environments over the infancy, childhood, and adolescent periods and has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Smith-Richardson Foundation, the Borderline Foundation, the Mailman Foundation, and the Commonwealth Fund. Several attachment-focused assessments developed in her lab are now being disseminated internationally, including the AMBIANCE scales for atypical parent-infant interaction. She is the author of more than 90 research articles and book chapters on infant development, maternal depression, the early attachment relationship, and, more recently, the interplay between genetic and environmental factors in young adult psychopathology. Under current NIH funding, her group is developing tools for assessing attachment relationships at risk in adolescence and evaluating their interplay with traumatic experiences and genetic factors in contributing to young adult depression, suicidality, and borderline psychopathology. In collaboration with McLean neuroscientists Diego Pizzagalli and Martin Teicher, studies are also assessing the effects of early adversity on neurobiological structure and function in young adulthood.

Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Nancy Rappaport, MD completed her General Psychiatry Training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and her Child & Adolescent training at the Cambridge Hospital. Her particular passion is training child psychiatrists to provide support to students and teachers. Particular research interests are in community based participatory research (with schools), understanding and providing safety assessments of aggressive students, refining CBT for traumatized adolescents and writing creatively (having published a memoir, In Her Wake: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother’s Suicide, in September 2009). Her most recent book is The Behavior Code – A Practice Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students, written with Jessica Minahan, M.Ed, BCBA. Dr. Rappaport received the prestigious Art of Healing award from the Cambridge Health Alliance Foundation in 2013. She was the long-time Director of School-based Mental Health Programs, and continues to teach the fellows in school-based child mental health work.

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Debra S. Rosenblum, MD completed her General Psychiatry training and her Child and Adolescent Fellowship at the Cambridge Health Alliance. She served as the Medical Director of the Outpatient Department in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and continues to precept the Second Year Fellows Psychopharmacology Clinic. She is the Director of the Developmentally and Neurologically Atypical Adults (DANAA) Clinic, a clinical, consultation, and teaching service providing care for adults with intellectual disabilities. She has extensive expertise in outpatient psychopharmacology management and a particular interest in children's relationship to popular culture and has published on this topic. She has also served on the Media Committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Director of Clinical Research in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Dr. Weiss joined the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Division in 2019 as Director of Clinical Research in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Before coming to CHA, she was Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Arkansas and the Director of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Division. Dr. Weiss has extensive research experience and has been awarded several grants. She has published over 100 articles, co-authored four books and five chapters. Dr. Weiss is bringing her extensive experience to continue her research focusing on ADHD symptoms in complex trauma, and the metabolic effects of antipsychotic medications. She has received numerous teaching awards. Dr. Weiss precepts first year fellows in psychopharmacology clinic and teaches the longitudinal first year seminar, Assessment and Treatment in Child Psychiatry.