Dr. Kimberley Lakes has devoted her career to improving the lives of children.
She was trained in one of the top doctoral programs in her field at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and completed a clinical child psychology internship at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Upon finishing her postdoctoral fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County, she established a large university-based neurodevelopmental clinic and a community outreach program for children at risk that has served more than 3,000 families in the last 10 years. She began her academic career in 2007 when she accepted a full-time faculty appointment in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). In 2018, Dr. Lakes left UCI and joined the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the University of California Riverside School of Medicine where she is currently a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry.
Dr. Lakes’ accolades include a 2023 Fulbright Global Scholar Award, which will support work in Ireland and South Africa. Other awards include the 2008 Outstanding Recent Graduate Award from the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in recognition of the impact of her work on the field of children’s mental health. In 2011, in recognition of the impact of her neurodevelopmental research, the Aspen Brain Forum and New York Academy of Sciences selected her for the Aspen Brain Forum Prize in Neuro-Education, Young Investigator Award. Dr. Lakes has received four awards from the National Institutes of Health for health disparities research. In 2015, she received a visiting scholar fellowship from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
“There is in every child at every stage a new miracle of vigorous unfolding.”
– Erik Erikson
Dr. Lakes is committed to disseminating her work in scientific journals, and is well-published and well-funded. As principal investigator, in the last 15 years Dr. Lakes has received more than 25 grants from federal or state agencies as well as private foundations, totaling more than 12 million dollars. She has been a co-investigator on numerous additional grants.
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