Bradley S. Peterson, MD, is the inaugural director of the Institute for the Developing Mind at Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), as well as Vice Chair for Research and Chief of the Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at the Keck School of Medicine and the University of Southern California. He joined CHLA and USC in July 2014 after 13 years at Columbia University, where he served as the director of the Center for Developmental Neuropsychiatry, the founding director of the MRI Research Program, and the Chief of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Before that, he spent 12 years at Yale University, where he served as Director of Neuroimaging at the Yale Child Study Center.

His research involves the development and use of neuroimaging technologies to identify the brain bases of psychiatric disorders and the mechanisms of therapeutic response across the life span. Specific disease processes that he studies include Autism, Depression, Bipolar Disorder, ADHD, Tourette syndrome, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Schizophrenia, eating disorders, stuttering, premature birth, and the effects of environmental toxins on brain development.

Dr. Peterson earned his medical degree from the University of Wisconsin Medical School in 1987. He then completed a residency in general psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1990, a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral research fellowship at the Yale Child Study Center in 1992, and a clinical fellowship in child psychiatry at Yale University in 1994. He also trained in adult and child psychoanalysis at Yale and Columbia from 1996-2008.