Our Experts
Clarice J. Kestenbaum, M.D.
Clarice J. Kestenbaum, M.D. has been acknowledged by many of her peers as one of psychiatry’s leading child and adolescent psychiatry clinicians. She is past President of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and is renowned for her experience and insight. Dr. Kestenbaum is a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and the Director of Training Emerita in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Prior to her arrival at Columbia University, Dr. Kestenbaum served as Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital from 1971 to 1984. Her extensive hospital-based and outpatient clinical experience includes many years of working with Project Headstart. Dr. Kestenbaum is also considered to be an expert in child development and psychopathology as well as children-at-risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. Currently, Dr. Kestenbaum is also a consultant for the Center of Prevention and Evaluation, a program that studies the period before development of psychotic states.
Dr. Kestenbaum is Board Certified by the American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology and American Board of Child Psychiatry. Dr. Kestenbaum is also a graduate of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research in adult and child psychoanalysis.
Dr. Kestenbaum is a student and scholar of the disease process and the therapeutic goal. She is an extensively-published author and has also produced a series of child development teaching tapes.
New York Magazine has counted Dr. Kestenbaum among the Best Doctors in New York for the past eight years. A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Kestenbaum is a co-founder of CARING at Columbia, an organization that helps inner city children-at-risk through the arts and literature.