The University of Oregon announced its first full-time executive director of The Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health on Tuesday.

Katie McLaughlin, a Harvard professor of psychology, will be taking on the role of executive director at the Portland-based institute in the fall of the 2023-2024 academic year. 

McLaughlin is the director of the Stress and Development Laboratory at Harvard, a research environment that examines how stress can contribute to a higher risk of mental health problems in children and adolescents. 

“The Ballmer Institute will provide an unprecedented platform to stimulate innovation in youth behavioral health at a moment when new approaches to intervention and service delivery are desperately needed,” McLaughlin said in a statement. 

Mental health services are lacking in the state of Oregon and the rest of the country.

According to reports conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20% of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 had a major depressive episode in the last year, but only about 10% of children and adolescents had access to adequate mental health care. 

The Ballmer Institute is UO’s answer to the increased demand for mental health professionals in the rest of the U.S., as populations grow and the number of psychiatrists active in the workforce constricts. 

The key purpose of the institute is to provide a workforce of psychiatric professionals trained in behavioral health practices to reduce the severity of mental health disorders in children and adolescents. 

The CDC is encouraging the integration of behavioral health best practices across agencies to combat an ongoing and intensifying mental health crisis in children across the U.S.

Research and policy addressing behavioral health problems are one spoke of the solution, but McLaughlin said that a major goal she has for the institute is to train professionals to meet children’s behavioral health needs in institutions where job listings for those professions don’t exist yet.

“When you look at medicine, you know, people go to medical school and can train in a wide range of professions. The number who go on to psychiatry, and then from there, the number that go into child psychiatry, is really small,” Mclaughlin said.

McLaughlin said one of her goals for the institute is to create new professional models for integrating behavioral health specialists into schools and pediatric care facilities, where children can be screened and offered brief interventions to help prevent behavioral health problems from emerging or becoming worse over time. 

The Ballmer Institute has already partnered with three Portland school districts, Portland Public, Parkrose and David Douglas, McLaughlin said, to integrate students into community settings at the beginning of their training.

The institute’s undergraduate child behavioral health major will have graduates receive over 700 hours of training in evidence-based behavioral health promotion, prevention and care practices, according to UO. UO said the major is the first of its kind.

“The university has never been more engaged and out in the world than we are with the Ballmer Institute,” UO Interim President Patrick Phillips said in a statement. 

McLaughlin is one more step toward building up the faculty and staff of The Ballmer Institute. The behavioral health major program will start admitting students in fall of 2023 and will continue to hire professors, executive assistants and lecturers throughout the year.

“The depth of Katie’s work in equity and inclusion is impressive,” Janet Woodruff-Borden, UO acting provost and executive vice president of The Ballmer Institute, said. “She has not only immersed herself in learning about it, she has brought it into her scholarship.”

John Flournoy, a research scientist who worked with McLauglin at the Stress and Development Laboratory, said McLaughlin has not only contributed to the academic discourse on children’s behavioral health through her research but has also encouraged diversity, inclusion and belonging initiatives within the lab.

“She has fostered a community atmosphere where graduate students and postdocs have felt comfortable taking the initiative to lead such work, which she has enthusiastically endorsed and participated in,” Flournoy said in an emailed statement.

McLaughlin said she is committed to making a real-world impact through her work with The Ballmer Institute, not just in an academic setting, but through directly meeting the needs of children and families.

McLaughlin, who was offered the job early this year, will be moving from Harvard to Oregon in the summer to start the position.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with comments from McLaughlin and Flournoy on Feb. 5.