Current Environment: Production

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.

Heather Walter | Media

Building Bridges of Understanding

Heather Walter | Publications

My professional life has been guided by my quest to bring the highest quality preventive and clinical care to society’s most vulnerable yet most promising citizens – its children. I am grateful to have been afforded the opportunity throughout my career to help our children build happy, healthy, and successful lives, and to help close the gap between youth needing health care services, and those receiving them.