Catherine Monk, PhD

Dr. Catherine Monk is Professor of Medical Psychology in the Departments of Obstetrics & Gynecology (Ob/Gyn), and Psychiatry, Research Scientist VI at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and founding director of the newly launched initiative to embed Women’s Mental Health in Columbia’s Ob/Gyn Department where she and other mental health professionals help women with stress, depression, anxiety across the lifespan. Dr. Monk’s research brings together perinatal psychiatry, developmental psychobiology, and neuroscience to focus on the earliest influences on children’s developmental trajectories — those that happen in utero and how to intervene early to help women and prevent risk for mental health disorders in the future children. Dr. Monk completed her postdoctoral research training in the Psychobiological Sciences via a NIH T32 at Columbia University. Her research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since she had her first support as a ‘K’ Career Development awardee in 2001; she also has received funding from the March of Dimes, Johnson & Johnson, the Robin Hood Foundation, the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and the Bezos Family Foundation. Dr. Monk has been awarded key roles on the NIH-wide ECHO project, Environmental influences on Children’s Health Outcomes — a seven-year, nationwide effort to study early factors, including women’s prenatal psychiatric illness and trauma histories, on children’s health outcomes across 50,000 participants. She is a PI on one ECHO project, Investigator on another, and elected by her peers to the ECHO Executive Committee. She recently started a 5-year NIH supported project titled Intergenerational Transmission of Deficits in Self-Regulatory Control as well as is continuing to direct a NIH-funded intervention study Preventing Postpartum Depression: A Dyadic Approach Adjunctive to Obstetric Care.