David R. DeMaso

Dr. DeMaso is George P. Gardner & Olga E. Monks Professor of Child Psychiatry and Professor of Pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School and former Psychiatrist-in-Chief and Chair at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). Dr. DeMaso currently directs BCH’s Office of Clinician Support (OCS). The OCS, which he founded, is designed to provide a safe alternative communication channel for all hospital clinicians to help address a wide range of professional and personal issues. Since the launch of the OCS, this innovative health and wellness program has provided over 5,000 individual clinician consultations and has reached over 15,000 clinicians through its group support program.

For over 40 years, Dr. DeMaso served as the psychiatric consultant to BCH’s Department of Cardiology where he has provided assessment and management services to youth with pediatric cardiac diseases, advancing a unique sub-specialty within child and adolescent psychiatry. Prior to becoming Psychiatrist-in-Chief, Dr. DeMaso directed BCH’s Pediatric Consultation Service, one of the country’s premier pediatric consultation-liaison psychiatry services. Dr. DeMaso has authored two textbooks on pediatric consultation-liaison psychiatry, built an educational website for families facing pediatric illnesses (Experience Journal), and has been recognized nationally by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s Simon Wile Leadership in Consultation Award, Catcher in the Rye Award, Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation Award for Research in Depression/Suicide (Experience Journal), and Distinguished Life Fellow.

As Psychiatrist-in-Chief, Dr. DeMaso and his team expanded BCH’s behavioral health care continuum through increasing availability of intensive and outpatient psychiatric services as well as creating innovative collaborations with other departments/divisions, pediatric primary care practices, community partners, and families. These initiatives included educational and clinical programs in school settings (BCH’s Neighborhood Partnership Program and BCH’s Training and Access Project) and in pediatric primary care (Behavioral Health Integration Program in the Pediatric Physician’s Organization at Children’s and Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program). Together with his colleagues, Dr. DeMaso is currently working to disseminate and measure outcomes of Building Bridges of Understanding, an online behavioral health education resource for pediatric primary care practitioners, mental health clinicians working in pediatric primary care, and pediatric patients and their families.