Dr. Peter Szatmari is a senior scientist and the Co-Director of the Cundill Centre for Child and Youth Depression at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), a research centre dedicated to discovery, dissemination and global leadership in the field of child and youth depression.
Until October 1st 2021, he was the Chief of the Child and Youth Mental Health Collaborative between CAMH, the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto.
Dr. Szatmari has worked in the field of child and youth psychiatry for over forty years in the areas of ADHD, disruptive behaviour disorders, depression and anxiety and impairment due to mental disorders. He is well known for his work in autism and has contributed to advances in diagnosis and classification, in genetics and in outcome studies.
In 2021, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for his contributions to mental health.
Areas of Research
Dr. Szatmari’s investigative interests fall broadly into areas of psychiatric and genetic epidemiology, specifically: 1) longitudinal studies of children with autism spectrum disorders and the factors associated with good outcome; and 2) the genetic etiology of autism including studying families with rare copy number variants and studies of infant siblings. Another area of interest is the developmental course of child and adolescent psychopathology including depression, eating disorders, oppositional behaviours and anxiety disorders, with a particular area of concern being measurement issues and sampling by family unit rather than by individuals.
More recently, he has turned his attention to the design and evaluation of clinical interventions in child and youth mental health as well as epidemiological work nationally and internationally.
Publications
View Dr. Szatmari's publications on PubMed.