Patricia Van Horn PhD

University of California, San Francisco
Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry

San Francisco General Hospital
Director of the Division of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry


Clinical Professor of in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco. She is Director of the Division of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Interim Director of Child and Adolescent Services, and Associate Director of the UCSF Child Trauma Research Program, all located at San Francisco General Hospital. Dr. Van Horn received her J.D. in 1970 from the University of Colorado School of Law, and her Ph.D. in 1996 from the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology. Her research at the Child Trauma Research Program is with children under six who have witnessed domestic violence and/or experienced maltreatment, investigating the efficacy of relationship-based model for treating the children and their caregivers. Other research activities include assessing the functioning of children under six exposed to domestic violence and living with their mothers in domestic violence shelters, and examining relational and other resilience factors among women who were in foster care as children. Her training activities include creation of an early childhood development curriculum for the divorcing parents of infants and toddlers; a child trauma curriculum for domestic violence advocates; and a curriculum for training community-based clinicians to implement Child-Parent Psychotherapy. She has provided intensive training in Child-Parent Psychotherapy, an evidence-based intervention developed at the Child Trauma Research Program, to clinicians in 27 states and in Israel. She is co-author of the books Losing a parent to death in the early years: Guidelines for the treatment of traumatic bereavement in infancy and early childhood; Don’t Hit my Mommy!: A manual of child-parent psychotherapy with young witnesses of family violence; and Psychotherapy with infants and young children: Repairing the effects of stress and trauma on early attachment.