Dr. DeFilippis is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. She graduated from the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, TX with her medical degree in 2006. She completed her general psychiatry residency and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at UTMB and joined their faculty upon completion of training in 2011.
She has served as the director of the child and adolescent psychiatry division since 2015. She is active in education and training at UTMB, and she has a busy clinic where she sees children, teens, and young adults with psychiatric conditions, including depression and suicidality.
Dr. DeFilippis has several publications in peer-reviewed journals and chapters for textbooks focusing on mood disorders in youth, treatment-resistant depression in youth, and depression in youth with autism. She has given regional, national, and international talks on mood disorders in children and teens, autism spectrum disorder in youth, and suicidality and non-suicidal self-injury in the juvenile justice population. She is an active member of the Galveston Suicide Prevention Coalition.
She is excited to be working as a node lead for the YDSRN network and collaborating with the other Texas teams on this project. She believes the research done by the network will create an opportunity to better understand depression and suicidality in Texas youth and highlight areas of need in the state.
She hopes this work leads to improved access to high quality mental health care for youth in Texas and, ultimately, decreases morbidity and mortality in youth suffering from depression. She is proud of the work being done by this network and is excited to be involved in such an impressive collaborative effort by the health-related institutions across Texas.
