Joan Kaufman, PhD
Dr. Kaufman received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Yale University where she served on faculty in the Department of Psychiatry from 1998-2015. In 2015 she was recruited to Baltimore to serve as Director of Research at the Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress at Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI). She also held an appointment as a Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Kaufman left KKI and academic medicine in August of 2022.
Dr. Kaufman’s research was predominantly in the area of child abuse and neglect, spanned from neurobiology to social policy, and used tools from psychology, genetics, and neuroscience to understand resilience and mechanisms of disease risk associated with early adversity. She received consistent funding from the National Institute of Health for her research, and she published over 100 peer-reviewed professional articles and book chapters. She also authored the book Broken Three Times: A Story of Child Abuse in America (Oxford University Press).The book is a narrative non-fiction story that follows one family through the child welfare system, with each chapter providing launching points for discussing state-of-the-art policy, practice, and scientific updates.
Dr. Kaufman is also first author on the paper-and-pencil KSADS child psychiatric diagnostic interview which has been translated into more than 30 languages, and she served as co-Principal Investigator on the grants funded to update the KSADS to the web-based computer-administered format. As one of the principal developers of the KSADS, Dr. Kaufman has served as a consultant on numerous federally-funded, and industry-sponsored child psychiatric clinical trials.