Charles H. Zeanah, Jr. is the Mary Peters Sellars Polchow Chair in Psychiatry and serves as Vice Chair for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, and Director of the Institute for Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health at the Tulane University School of Medicine. He received his bachelor’s degree in English and his M.D. from Tulane University. He completed a pediatric internship at the University of Virginia, a residency in general psychiatry at Duke University, and a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry and a research fellowship at Stanford University.
Throughout his career, Dr. Zeanah has studied the effects of adverse early experiences, including trauma, abuse, and neglect on young children’s development. He has been a leader in infant mental health, exploring attachment and attachment disorders in conditions of extreme risk. He also has studied interventions designed to enhance recovery following exposure to adverse experiences and has published widely on these topics. With fellow Ruane recipients Drs. Nelson and Fox, he has explored the effects of severe early deprivation on brain and behavioral development in the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, and is co-author of Romania’s Abandoned Children: Deprivation, Brain Development and the Struggle for Recovery (Harvard University Press, 2014).
Dr. Zeanah has won numerous awards, including the Irving Phillips Award for Prevention (2006) and the Norbert and Charlotte Rieger Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement (2016) from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Blanche F. Ittelson Award for Research in Child Psychiatry (2009) and the Agnes Purcell McGavin Award for Prevention (2015) from the American Psychiatric Association, and the Serge Lebovici Award (2010) from the World Association for Infant Mental Health.