He studied history at Dartmouth College, and medicine and public health at Harvard. He completed his Psychiatry training at MGH-McLean Hospitals, and training in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center where he learned about the delivery of rural mental health care in the US context.

In 2010 he took leadership of the Partners In Health mental health response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. He concurrently led a new departmental quality program in the Department of Psychiatry at Boston Children’s Hospital that provides oversight of safety, quality, and outcomes initiatives in child and adolescent mental health care.

His academic work has centered on the integration and application of quality improvement and public health approaches in innovating clinical practice, teaching and research in the domains of psychiatry and global mental health, particularly in developing new intervention programs in mental health integrated within primary care systems in low resource settings.

Under his leadership at Partners In Health the organization has worked to integrate mental health services into the health systems supported by PIH, testing models of care in locations where there is a significant lack of specialists. This has included the creation of community-based mental health systems in Haiti and Rwanda, and supporting mental health program development in Mexico (Chiapas), Peru (Lima), Liberia, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Lesotho, Siberia, Navajo Nation in New Mexico, and the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.

This work meets a critical local and global need for innovative, community-delivered, preventive and clinical mental health solutions, given the significant global burden of mental disorders and a universal shortage of specialists.