Theresa Betancourt, ScD, MA

Harvard University / Harvard School of Public Health
FXB Center for Health and Human Rights; Department of Global Health and Population
651 Huntington Avenue
FXB Building, 7th Floor
Boston, MA
USA 02115
Email: theresa_betancourt@harvard.edu

Biographical Sketch: Theresa Betancourt, ScD, MA, is Assistant Professor of Child Health and Human Rights in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). Dr. Betancourt is a member of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, where she directs the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity (RPGCA). Her central research interests focus on the developmental and psychosocial consequences of concentrated adversity on children and families, resilience and protective processes in child mental health, health and human rights, and cross-cultural mental health research. She is the Principal Investigator of a prospective longitudinal study of war-affected youth in Sierra Leone and is leading a mixed-methods study in Rwanda to develop and test family-strengthening interventions for HIV/AIDS-affected youth, conducted in collaboration with Partners in Health. In addition, she is working with colleagues at Children’s Hospital Boston to study strengths and sources of resilience in Somali refugee children and families resettled in the US. Previously, Dr. Betancourt worked as a mental health clinician in both school and community settings and consulted on global children’s mental health issues for various international NGOs and United Nations agencies. She was recently awarded a K01 Career Development Award from the National Institutes for Mental Health to study modifiable protective processes in the mental health of refugee children and adolescents.

Papers:
3450.0 Addressing the consequences of war: A randomized controlled trial of a group intervention to improve emotion regulation, prosocial skills and functioning in war-affected youth 4150.0 Prevalence of mental health problems and protective factors in children and adolescents affected and unaffected by HIV/AIDS in rural Rwanda 4196.0 Employing a public private partnership (PPP) to treat mental anguish in the massively traumatized population in northern Uganda 4401.1 Family-based prevention of mental health problems among children affected by HIV/AIDS in rural Rwanda: A pilot feasibility study