Cristiane Duarte is the Ruane Professor for the Implementation of Science for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. As a Research Scientist, her studies focus on developmental psychopathology and intergenerational processes, with particular attention to children who are socially excluded or raised in environments where their rights are violated and access to essential resources and services is inadequate. Her career has centered on innovative, large-scale population-based studies designed to generate knowledge about mental disorders following exposure to situations of high public health impact, such as exposure to adversities in childhood.
Since 2010, Dr. Duarte has been leading the Boricua Youth Study (BYS), a 20+ year longitudinal, population-based study of ~2,500 Puerto Rican children in the South Bronx, NYC and the San Juan metropolitan area in the island of Puerto Rico. More recently, her team completed the BYS-ECHO study, which successfully enrolled the BYS second generation (N~1,300). Her efforts to examine more specific mechanisms of intergenerational transmission in psychiatry among children highly exposed to adversities have since expanded, with two NIMH-supported studies currently underway in Brazil.
Dr. Duarte is also dedicated to educating and mentoring future generations of mental health researchers and practitioners, with an emphasis on international scholars and those from racially or ethnically minoritized groups in the USA who have been traditionally underrepresented in science. She has received numerous awards for her mentorship from Columbia University and twice by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Dr. Duarte is currently a member of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Division Executive Committee; the Department of Psychiatry Diversity and Inclusion Committee; the American Psychological Association Council, and the National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse (NACDA).