Dr. Kate Keenan received a B.A. from Williams College in 1986, and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1995. She completed her clinical internship at the Children’s Memorial Hospital at Northwestern University and then joined the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, where she is currently Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience.

Dr. Keenan’s program of research in developmental psychopathology spans several developmental periods and phenotypes. The integrative thread running through each study is the aim of identifying the earliest appearing individual differences that connote risk for poor health. The work is designed to be relevant to the the development of prevention interventions. She is specifically interested in the study of the type and timing of stress exposure on health outcomes and developing scalable targets that can reduce health disparities for racial and sexual minority populations.

Dr. Keenan’s research is funded through the National Institute of Mental Health , the National Institute of Heart Lung and Blood, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.  and the Office of the Director at NIH. She is past-President of the International Society for Research in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology.

Additional support comes from the University of Chicago Institute for Translational Medicine, Clinical and Translation Science Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and the March of Dimes