Mood Disorders and Children

Director of the Pediatric Bipolar Disorder Clinical and Research Program

Dr. Janet Wozniak is widely regarded as a national expert on the topic of pediatric bipolar disorder and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. She is associate chief of psychiatry for quality and safety and director of the Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Outpatient Service. She is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Wozniak’s research focuses on the characteristics, course and treatment of pediatric bipolar disorder. Her 1995 paper on childhood mania is one of the ten most cited papers published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Her current research focuses on treating pediatric bipolar disorder with complementary and alternative treatments and investigating cerebral organoids as a novel biomarker for pediatric bipolar disorder. She has authored dozens of scientific articles and cares for hundreds of children and teens in her clinical practice at Mass General. She is co-author of a book for parents, “Positive Parenting for Bipolar Kids.” She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College and her medical degree from Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where she earned a SmithKline Beckman Medical Perspectives Award for Outstanding Medical Students. She completed her adult and child psychiatry training at Mass General.

Chief Science Officer, Center for Law, Brain & Behavior

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Mass General and Harvard Medical School. Her lab is developing a systems-level model of brain and body mechanisms to unify human affect, emotion, motivation, cognition and action. She is in the top one percent most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience.

Dr. Barrett is the recipient of a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for transformative research, the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (APA) and a Guggenheim Fellowship in neuroscience. A former APS president, she has testified before the US Congress and engages in informal science education for the public via popular books, articles and public lectures. In addition to her books, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain and How Emotions are Made, Dr. Barrett has published over 250 peer-reviewed, scientific papers. She has also given a popular TED talk with over six million views. She received her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Waterloo

Director of Suicide Research

Dr. Richard Liu is director of suicide research in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and director of Big Data Studies in the Depression Clinical and Research Program. Dr. Liu’s research program focuses on characterizing dynamic processes of risk underlying onset and recurrence of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors and depression in youth and young adults, and he has over 100 publications on these and related topics.

Dr. Liu is currently the principal investigator of three NIMH-funded studies involving computational modeling of ecological momentary assessment data and ambulatory measures of psychosocial stress, sleep, and physiological arousal, as well as neurocognitive markers of short-term risk for suicidal behavior in adolescents. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from Temple University after completing his internship at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center and he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University. He is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

Director of the Child Depression Program

Dr. Mai Uchida’s research program is focused on the characteristics, longitudinal course and treatment of unipolar depression and bipolar mood disorders in children. In collaboration with Dr. John Gabrieli at MIT and Dr. Joseph Biederman at Mass General, she has published on the functional and structural MRI based biomarkers of the risk for development of major depression. She is a current awardee of the National Institute of Health K23 award and has received the First Prize, Department of Psychiatry Award as well as the Dupont Warren Fellowship Livingston Award, Pilot and Feasibility Award from MassGeneral for Children, and Milton Award from HMS.

Dr. Uchida’s expertise is also in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children and adulthood. She has been named a Louis V Gerstner Scholar for her work in neural networks that affect emotional regulation in adults with ADHD. She is a committed advocate for mental health and shares her experiences as a parent in discussing issues such as racism, gender inequality and emotional regulation. In the past year, she was integrally involved in the COVID-19 communication in Japan to help the community take effective prevention and understand the science of vaccination.