Michael D De Bellis received his undergraduate training at New York University and his medical training at the State University of New York at Downstate in 1987. He did his adult training in General Psychiatry at New York University Medical Center/ Bellevue Hospital Center and spent a two year post-doctoral Fellowship in neuroendocrinology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland. During that period, he was the lead author on a paper titled “Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis Dysregulation in Sexually Abused Girls” and changed his focus to child and adolescent psychiatry, particularly the effects of childhood maltreatment on children’s mental health, mood and anxiety problems, and neurobiological development. He then completed his Child and Adolescent Psychiatry fellowship and another NIH research fellowship at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic/University of Pittsburgh and remained at Pittsburgh for his K award training. There he published seminal work titled “Developmental Traumatology: Biological Stress Systems and Brain Development in Maltreated Children with PTSD.” This work received the prestigious A.E. Bennett Award from the Society of Biological Psychiatry in 1998. Dr De Bellis obtained his MPH form the University of Pittsburgh, School of Public Health in 2000. He has a continuing interest in the development of maltreated children and their risk for adolescent onset substance use disorders at Duke, where as a professor, he has lead several federal grants related to these issues since 2003.