Bruce F. Chorpita, PhD (he/him/his) is Professor of Psychology and Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his PhD in psychology from the University at Albany, State University of New York and held a faculty position with the Department of Psychology at the University of Hawaii from 1997 to 2008. From 2001 to 2003, Dr. Chorpita served as the Clinical Director of the Hawaii Department of Health’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division, where he led a reform initiative that doubled the effect size and cost effectiveness of mental health outcomes for all youth served by the state system. He has published more than 300 scientific papers, many of which focus on strategies for improving efficiency and quality in children’s mental health systems, and he is the lead author of the MATCH-ADTC protocol, an evidence-based treatment that outperformed multiple other evidence-based treatments in two randomized effectiveness trials in three different states. His ongoing research is aimed at improving the effectiveness of mental health service systems for children through innovation in mental health treatment design, clinical decision-making, information-delivery models, and service system architecture. He has been awarded more than $25M in research funding, from the National Institute of Mental Health, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the William T. Grant Foundation, as well as multiple state and county mental health systems, and is a Past President of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.
Dr. Chorpita served as the lead developer for the intensive treatment component of PRIDE, a project designed to develop, test, and disseminate effective treatments and training models for lay counselors to address anxiety, depression, and anger problems in adolescents in India. With support from the William T. Grant Foundation, he is the PI for the Reaching Families multisite trial (Becker, Co-PI), an investigation of strategies to improve the use of evidence in supervision and clinical decision making and to improve family engagement in mental health services in low income communities in Los Angeles public schools as well as in multiple counties in rural South Carolina. From 2021 to 2022, Dr. Chorpita served as a National Academy of Sciences Committee Member for Accelerating Behavioral Science Through Ontology Development and Use, which involved working to establish a commitment to a shared conceptualization and set of terms and relationships within behavioral science, to help set the stage for improved scientific discovery, evidence retrieval and application (e.g., through clinical knowledge appliances), and automated reasoning.