Judith L. Rapoport has concentrated her research on several aspects of child psychiatry, including childhood hyperactivity, pediatric psychopharmacology, and obsessive-compulsive disorder-the subject of her 1989 book, The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing. Over the past decade, her group has been studying the clinical phenomenology, neurobiology, and treatment of childhood-onset schizophrenia, as well as normal and abnormal brain development in childhood and adolescence.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania (1955), Rapoport received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School (1959) and did her clinical and research training at Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston, Children's Hospital in Washington, D.C., the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, and the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Md. She joined the psychiatry unit of NIMH in 1976 and has been chief of its Child Psychiatry Branch since 1984. Rapoport also serves as a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University School of Medicine and a clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Georgetown University Medical School.

Rapoport is the author or co-author of five books and more than 300 scientific papers and serves of the editorial boards of several professional psychiatry journals. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.