Heather Walter | Medical Services
Programs & Services
Languages
- English
Heather Walter | Education
Medical School
Loma Linda University
1974, Loma Linda, CA
Internship
Loma Linda University Medical Center
1975, Loma Linda, CA
Graduate School
School of Public Health
University of California Los Angeles
1981, Los Angeles, CA
Residency
Preventive Medicine
University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center
1981, Los Angeles, CA
Residency
General Psychiatry
New York University Medical Center/Bellevue Hospital Center
1986, New York, NY
Fellowship
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center/New York State Psychiatric Institute
1988, New York, NY
Heather Walter | Professional History
Reflecting her training in both preventive medicine/public health and child and adolescent psychiatry, Dr. Walter’s clinical innovations have focused on expanding access to health care for children and adolescents through education, consultation, and service delivery in primarily underserved community-based settings. In New York City, she created and evaluated school-based, teacher-delivered preventive interventions to reduce the risk for the future development of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and HIV/AIDS. Subsequently, she focused on the integration and evaluation of preventive, early intervention, and clinical behavioral health services in schools and pediatric primary care in Chicago and Boston.
Dr. Walter has been board certified in public health and general preventive medicine, psychiatry, and child and adolescent psychiatry. She has served as director of school psychiatry at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, medical director of psychiatric outpatient services at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry and vice-chair of psychiatry at Boston Medical Center, medical director for behavioral health at the Pediatric Physicians’ Organization at [Boston] Children’s [Hospital], and medical co-director for the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program. Dr. Walter also chaired the Committee on Quality Issues for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), which during her tenure published 30 clinical practice guidelines that were disseminated nationally through the Journal of AACAP. For her contributions to the field of child and adolescent psychiatry, AACAP honored Dr. Walter with the Simon Wile Leadership in Consultation Award, the Catchers in the Rye Award, and Distinguished Life Fellow.
Dr. Walter currently has more than 170 print and media publications pertaining to clinical education and community-based participatory research. She attained the rank of Professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern Feinberg and Boston University medical schools, and currently is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Senior Attending Psychiatrist at Boston Children’s Hospital. Her current work focuses on the development, dissemination, and evaluation of a new Boston Children’s Hospital website – Building Bridges of Understanding – that provides readily accessible evidence-based behavioral health education to pediatric primary care practitioners, behavioral health clinicians working in pediatric settings, and pediatric patients and their families.