Description
Maria Kovacs, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Kovacs has been internationally recognized for her expertise in childhood depression. Since the 1980s, her research and clinical work have focused on ways to understand, prevent, or mitigate childhood-onset depression. She has led an international team that studied the early childhood development of self-regulating sadness and distress, how emotion regulation problems serve as a risk factor that eventually enables the emergence of clinical depression, and the ways in which family context, physiology, genetics, and personal characteristics can strengthen or counteract this risk factor. The developer of research tools including the Children's Depression Inventory and the Feelings and Me questionnaires, Dr. Kovacs has lectured extensively on her work both internationally and nationally, and has published more than 200 articles in scientific journals.