Eric Youngstrom, Ph.D., is a professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is also the Acting Director of the Center for Excellence in Research and Treatment of Bipolar Disorder. He is the first recipient of the Early Career Award from the Division of Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychology, and is an elected full member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. He has consulted on the 5th Revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). He chairs the Work Group on Child Diagnosis for the International Society for Bipolar Disorders.
He earned his doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Delaware, and he completed his predoctoral internship training at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic before joining the faculty at Case Western Reserve University, and then moving to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006.
Dr. Youngstrom is a licensed psychologist who specializes in the relationship of emotions and psychopathology, and the clinical assessment of children and families. He teaches courses on assessment and therapy, developmental psychopathology, research design, and multivariate statistics, and has earned the Tanner, Carl F. Wittke, Glennan Fellowship, and the Northeastern Ohio Teaching Awards.
He actively investigates ways of improving the use of clinical assessment instruments for making better differential diagnoses, predictions about future functioning, or monitoring of treatment progress – particularly with regard to bipolar disorder across the lifespan. Dr. Youngstrom has spoken on the topic of pediatric bipolar disorder at scientific meetings in Canada, Europe, South America, and Asia, as well as around the United States. Dr. Youngstrom has published more than 225 peer reviewed publications on the topics of clinical assessment and emotion, and he has served as an ad hoc reviewer on more than seventy prominent psychology and psychiatry journals as well as being on the editorial boards of Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, and Psychological Assessment.
He is currently on the Education Committee and the Research Committee of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders. Dr. Youngstrom was the principal investigator on a five year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH066647) and co-investigator of a second, multi-site R01, both designed to improve the assessment of bipolar disorder in diverse community samples. He has received grants from the NIMH, the Ohio Department of Mental Health, Cuyahoga County, and the Schubert Center for Child Development. He is currently the president of the Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (APA Division 53).