Inside Duke Medicine

Dr. Egger New Director of Child Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Duke Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Department is pleased to announce that Dr. Helen Egger is the newly appointed Director of Child Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Egger will also hold the role of Director of Integrated Pediatric Mental Health. In this role, she will work on the development of closer interdepartmental collaborations on child mental health throughout the health system.

Dr. Egger is a child psychiatrist and epidemiologist who graduated from Yale School of Medicine and completed her adult and child psychiatric training and post-doctoral research fellowship at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Egger’s research program within the Duke Center for Developmental Epidemiology focuses on the developmental epidemiology and developmental neuroscience of psychiatric disorders, particularly anxiety disorders, in preschool children. With a series of longitudinal, developmentally-informed, community studies of young children starting at the age of 2, Dr. Egger and her collaborator Dr. Angold have brought the methods and approaches of developmental epidemiology and developmental neuroscience to the infant/preschool mental health field. A key contribution has been their development of measures and methods for the assessment of early childhood psychopathology that have enabled researchers at Duke and beyond to advance our understanding of the characteristics, course, environmental and biological correlates, and outcomes of psychiatric symptoms and syndromes in the preschool period. Dr. Egger is lead author of the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment (PAPA), the first comprehensive parent-report psychiatric interview about children ages two through five years old. The PAPA is translated into French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian, and Spanish and is used in numerous studies in the United States and abroad. Across their studies (begun in 2001), Dr. Egger and Dr. Angold have (1) screened over 5,000 parents of preschoolers at pediatric primary care clinics; (2) conducted over 2,000 PAPAs and CAPAs with parents of children ranging in age from 2-12, over 500 laboratory assessments with children ages 2-7, over 700 eye tracking assessments, and over 100 structural and functional MRI scans with children ages 5-7 years old. There are relatively few functional imaging studies conducted with very young children. Dr. Egger’s current imaging study is one of the first pediatric, prospective, longitudinal functional neuroimaging studies conducted with a community sample of children.

Dr. Egger has also served in multiple leadership positions within the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP). She is currently on the Board of Directors of Zero to Three, a national, non-profit organization focused on improving the health and development of infants, toddlers and their families, and a member of the FDA Psychopharmacologic D.
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