Detailed Biography:

Rochelle Caplan, M.D. is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Directed the UCLA Pediatric Neuropsychiatry clinical program for twenty years. She completed her medical studies at the Jerusalem University Hadassah Medical School and her training in adult and child psychiatry at the Tel-Aviv University Sackler Medical School. She has conducted NIH funded studies on the development of thinking and discourse skills in children with neurobehavioral disorders, such as childhood schizophrenia and pediatric epilepsy. She has developed instruments for studying how children use language to formulate their thoughts and present them to the listener. She has conducted studies on normal development of these skills and their abnormalities (i.e., thought disorder) in children with schizophrenia and schizophrenia spectrum disorders, epilepsy, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and high functioning autistic disorder. She has also studied psychopathology, cognition, and language in medically and surgically treated children with epilepsy, as well as obstacles to mental health care in these children. More recently she has used multimodal imaging techniques to study the biological underpinnings of psychopathology, language, and thought disorder in children with epilepsy and of thought disorder and language in children with schizophrenia. Dr. Caplan serves on the editorial board of Epilepsia and Epilepsy and Behavior, chairs the Pediatric Non-epileptic Seizures Subcommittee of the American Epilepsy Society Non-epileptic Seizure Task Force, and serves on the American Epilepsy Psychiatry Task Force, and the International League Against Epilepsy Pediatric Child Neuropsychiatry Task Force. She has received national and community awards in recognition of her research, as well as her mentoring and teaching of young faculty, residents, and child psychiatry fellows. Dr. Caplan has published the findings of her research in over 100 research papers in peer reviewed journals, 25 book chapters, and 190 abstracts.