Joan Kaufman, PhD

Joan Kaufman, PhD, the director of research at the Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress at Kennedy Krieger Institute and a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her research is in child abuse and neglect and spans from neurobiology to social policy.

She uses psychology, genetics, and neuroscience tools to understand resilience and disease risk mechanisms in this vulnerable population. She wrote Broken Three Times: A Story of Child Abuse in America, a non-fiction book that follows one family through the child welfare system. Dr. Kaufman is the first author of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia child psychiatric diagnostic interview.