Rochelle Caplan, MD

Rochelle Caplan, MD, is a pediatric neuropsychiatrist. Dr. Caplan is the Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the UCLA Department of Psychiatry, and she directed the UCLA Pediatric Neuropsychiatry clinical program for twenty years.

She completed her medical studies at the Jerusalem University Hadassah Medical School and her training in adult and child psychiatry at the Tel-Aviv University Sackler Medical School.

She has conducted NIH-funded studies on the development of thinking and discourse skills in children with neurobehavioral disorders, such as childhood schizophrenia and pediatric epilepsy. Dr. Caplan has developed instruments for studying how children use language to formulate and present their thoughts to the listener. She has studied the normal development of these skills and their abnormalities (i.e., thought disorder) in children with schizophrenia and schizophrenia spectrum disorders, epilepsy, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and high-functioning autistic disorder.

Dr. Caplan serves on the editorial board of Epilepsia and Epilepsy and Behavior, chairs the Pediatric Non-epileptic Seizures Subcommittee of the American Epilepsy Society Non-epileptic Seizure Task Force, and serves on the American Epilepsy Psychiatry Task Force, and the International League Against Epilepsy Pediatric Child Neuropsychiatry Task Force. Dr. Caplan has published her research findings in over 100 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, 25 book chapters, and 190 abstracts.