Catherine Monk, PhD, is the inaugural Diana Vagelos Professor of Women’s Mental Health in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Professor of Medical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Research Scientist VI at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Monk is also the founding director of Women’s Mental Health @Ob/Gyn, an embedded initiative where she and other mental health professionals help women with stress, depression, anxiety across the lifespan. After completing her NIH post–doctoral fellowship in the Psychobiological Sciences at Columbia in 2000, Dr. Monk joined the faculty and established the Perinatal Pathways Laboratory(link is external and opens in a new window).

Dr. Monk’s research brings together perinatal psychiatry, developmental psychobiology, and neuroscience to focus on the earliest influences on children’s developmental trajectories — those that happen in utero and how to intervene early to help women and prevent risk for mental health disorders in the future children. Her research has been continuously funded by the NIH since she had her first support as a ‘K’ Career Development awardee in 2001; she also has received funding from the March of Dimes, Johnson & Johnson, the Robin Hood Foundation, the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and the Bezos Family Foundation.