Dr. Lieberman is the Irving B. Harris Endowed Chair in Infant Mental Health and Vice Chair for Academic Affairs at the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, and Director of the Child Trauma Research Program. She is a clinical consultant with the San Francisco Human Services Agency. She is active in major national organizations involved with mental health in infancy and early childhood. She is past-president of the board of directors of Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families, and on the Professional Advisory Board of the Johnson & Johnson Pediatric Institute. She has served on peer review panels of the National Institute of Mental Health, is on the Board of Trustees of the Irving Harris Foundation, and consults with the Miriam and Peter Haas Foundation on early childhood education for Palestinian-Israeli children.
Born and raised in Paraguay, she received her BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. This background informs her work on behalf of children and families from diverse ethnic and cultural origins, with primary emphasis on the experiences of Latinos in the United States.
Dr. Lieberman is currently the director of the Early Trauma Treatment Network (ETTN), a collaborative of four university sites that include the UCSF/SFGH Child Trauma Research Program, Boston Medical Center, Louisiana State University Medical Center, and Tulane University. ETTN is funded by the federal Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) as part of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a 40-site national initiative that has the mission of increasing the access and quality of services for children exposed to trauma in the United States. Her major interests include infant mental health, disorders of attachment, early trauma treatment outcome research, and mental health service disparities for underserved and minority children and families. Her current research involves treatment outcome evaluation of the efficacy of child-parent psychotherapy with trauma-exposed children aged birth to six and with pregnant women involved in domestic violence. As a trilingual, tricultural Jewish Latina, she has a special interest in cultural issues involving child development, child rearing, and child mental health. She lectures extensively on these topics nationally and internationally.