Speaker
Dr. Christina Cruz
Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States,.
Biography
Christina M. Cruz, MD, EdM is a child global mental health and school mental health researcher, a practicing inpatient child and adolescent psychiatrist, and a mental health systems consultant. Her research program centers on increasing access to child mental health care through alternative systems. Currently, she is focused on task-shifting indicated mental health care to teachers in Darjeeling, India for children in primary schools, scaling this care to the public schools of Manila, Philippines, and adapting this care to the middle school age group for a rural State of North Carolina context in the United States. She is also now working to extend the care in Darjeeling to adolescents, as well as using tenets of the care to address mental health and climate change concerns among Darjeeling farmers.
She is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) School of Medicine with a joint appointment in School Psychology at the UNC School of Education. She also serves as the Associate Head of the Division of Global Mental Health within UNC Psychiatry. She additionally serves as founder and Principal of Ligaya, LLC a mental health systems consulting firm. She completed her Bachelor of Science in Economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, her Masters in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and her MD from Harvard Medical School. She completed her general psychiatry residency and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at UNC.