Dr. William Beardslee directs the Preventive Intervention Project as well as the Prevention of Depression Study at The Baker Center.  He has served as the Academic Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Children's Hospital Boston and is the Gardner-Monks Professor of Child Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In 1998, Dr. Beardslee was appointed to the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Dr. Beardslee's long-standing research interest has centered on the development of children who are at risk due to severe parental mental illness and focuses on the ways in which self-understanding helps individuals cope with adversity.  His early work describes civil rights workers and how they were able to endure and indeed significantly change the South. He studied resilience in survivors of cancer and in children of depressed parents that led to the development of effective public health interventions for families facing depression, and a ten year randomized trial examination of the two strategies which showed that they were safe and led to lasting gains. This approach has since received high ratings in the National Registry of Effective Programs  and is being disseminated widely in Finland, Norway, Costa Rica, and in programs in this country.  Dr. Beardslee is currently directing a long-range study at The Baker Center funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) that explores the effects of clinician-facilitated, family-based preventive intervention. This research is designed to gauge the impact of direct intervention and measure its ability to enhance resilience and family understanding for children of parents with affective disorder. In June 2002, Dr. Beardslee published a book for families and lay caregivers about the process of dealing with depression: Out of the Darkened Room: Protecting the Children and Strengthening the Family When a Parent Is Depressed (Little, Brown and Company).

Dr. Beardslee received his B.A. from Haverford College and his M.D. from Case Western Reserve University. His postdoctoral training took place at Moffett Hospital/University of California Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.