Maria Kovacs

Maria Kovacs, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Kovacs has been internationally recognized for her expertise in childhood depression. Since the 1980s, her research and clinical work have focused on ways to understand, prevent, or mitigate childhood-onset depression and its sequelae later in life. She led an international team that studied the early development of the self-regulation of sadness and distress in young children, the role of emotion regulation problems as risk factors that enable the emergence of clinical depression, and ways in which family context, physiology, genetics, and personal characteristics can enable or counteract these risk factors. She developed many research tools, including the Children’s Depression Inventory and the Feelings and Me Questionnaires. Dr. Kovacs has lectured extensively on her work, both nationally and internationally, and has published more than 200 articles in scientific journals.