Judith L. Herman, M.D., and Frank W. Putnam, M.D.

Judith Lewis Herman, M.D., is a semi-retired professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She did her residency training and a fellowship in community psychiatry at Boston University Medical Center in the 1970s. During the era of deinstitutionalization, she participated in the creation of model community programs for people with serious mental illness who had formerly been housed in a state hospital. In 1981, she joined the staff of Cambridge Hospital, a public sector, safety-net hospital, where, with her colleague Mary Harvey, Ph.D., a community psychologist, she co-founded the Victims of Violence Program in 1984. This was an outpatient mental health service for trauma survivors that also provided clinical training for trainees in psychiatry, psychology, social work, and nursing, conducted clinical research, and developed a model of community intervention after incidents of mass violence. She is the author of three books: Father Daughter Incest (1981), Trauma and Recovery (1992), and Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (2023).

Frank W. Putnam, M.D., was trained in adult psychiatry at Yale, followed by a clinical research fellowship at the NIMH intramural research program in Bethesda, Maryland. Joining the NIMH faculty, he initially focused on adult Dissociative Disorders. Research with dissociative adults, led Putnam to look for dissociative children. This, in turn, led him to evaluate many abused and traumatized children. In the mid-1980s he completed a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry, changing his research focus to child abuse. Together with a colleague, the late Penelope Penny Trickett, Ph.D., a developmental psychologist, they started a prospective, longitudinal study of incestuously abused girls, ages 6-15, with a demographically matched, non-abused comparison group. This research, the Female Growth and Development Study, has followed the biological, psychological, and social developmental outcomes of severe sexual abuse for over 30 years. This research continues today, in all three generations have participated, revealing the numerous, intertwined biological, behavioral, and intergenerational outcomes associated with severe early childhood trauma. In 2000, Putnam became a Professor of Pediatrics, directing a comprehensive child abuse forensic, treatment, training, and research center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. There, as a division director, he dealt with the many crazy-making issues, dysfunctional systems, and problematic policies involved in providing mental health and medical services to a largely Medicaid population of children and families. In 2011, he became a clinical professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Putnam has published over 200 research papers and three books on dissociative disorders and child abuse with a fourth book currently under consideration.

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