Licensed Clinical Psychologist
Kennedy Krieger Institute
Dr. Bettencourt is a child psychologist who came to Johns Hopkins in 2010 to complete a postdoctoral fellowship in Prevention Science in the School of Public Health. She spent 6 years implementing and evaluating programs in the Baltimore community through positions in Baltimore City Schools and the Fund for Educational Excellence before joining the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry in 2017. Dr. Bettencourt’s research focuses on the prevention and treatment of disruptive behavior problems in youth. In particular, she focuses on identifying malleable risk and protective factors associated with the development of disruptive behavior problems, and evaluating efforts to integrate interventions designed to prevent and treat pediatric mental health problems into schools and primary care settings. She was recently awarded an NIH Loan Repayment Award for her study of parent and child factors that can be leveraged to strengthen young children’s social-behavioral readiness to learn in kindergarten among youth at high social and economic risk for school failure. As part of this work, Dr. Bettencourt and colleagues in the JHU School of Nursing are examining the impact of implementing the Chicago Parent Program, a 12-session evidence-based parenting program for parents of young children, in Baltimore City Schools PreK on children’s educational outcomes. Dr. Bettencourt is also the site-PI and lead evaluator for the Maryland Behavioral Health Integration in Pediatric Primary Care (MD-BHIPP), an effort to provide telephone clinical consultation to primary care providers to support their management of pediatric mental health problems in their practices.