Pediatric OCD
Extraordinary-tier specialists

Eric Storch is Professor and McIngvale Presidential Endowed Chair in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine, where he serves as Vice Chair and Head of Psychology and co-directs the OCD program with Wayne Goodman (the original CY-BOCS author). Few researchers in any field of psychiatry match Storch's output: over 850 peer-reviewed articles and 14+ books, with a Google Scholar profile cited 55,000+ times.

What matters for a 13-year-old with rigid ritual circuits is not the count but the breadth: Storch led or co-led the validation studies for the pediatric self-report and parent-report CY-BOCS, the family accommodation scales, OCD-in-autism measures, and treatment-resistance metrics. His group at Baylor/Texas Children's runs multiple active NIH and pharma trials in pediatric OCD including PANS/PANDAS work and intensive outpatient protocols. He is a Fulbright Scholar, sits on the IOCDF Scientific & Clinical Advisory Board, and is Associate Editor at the Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders. For families where comorbid autism, treatment-resistance, or unusual presentations have stalled progress, Storch's program is one of the few US sites running active novel-mechanism trials.

John Piacentini directs the UCLA Child OCD, Anxiety and Tic Disorders Program at the Semel Institute, which is also a Tourette Association of America Center of Excellence. He was a principal investigator on the landmark Pediatric OCD Treatment Study (POTS) — the NIMH-funded multisite RCT that established that combined CBT + sertraline outperforms either alone for youth OCD — and a designer of the family-focused CBT manuals used worldwide.

His credentials read like a tour of the field's gatekeeping bodies: past president of the Society of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology (APA Division 53), past president of the American Board of Professional Psychology and American Board of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, Fellow of the APA and the Association for Psychological Science, and a member of the IOCDF Scientific & Clinical Advisory Board. He chairs the Scientific Advisory Board of the TLC Foundation for BFRBs and co-chairs the Tourette Association's behavioral sciences consortium. With 300+ peer-reviewed papers and nine books — including the most widely-used youth-OCD CBT therapist guides — he is the person most likely to have trained the clinician who trained your clinician. UCLA's program offers the full diagnostic, CBT, and pharmacologic workup, plus integrated tic-disorder care that matters when ritual circuits are rigid and may have a motor component.

Jennifer Freeman is Co-Director of the Pediatric Anxiety Research Center (PARC) at Bradley Hospital and Associate Professor (Research) of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University's Alpert Medical School. She was a site investigator on POTS I and POTS II, then became principal investigator of the NIMH-funded POTS Jr. trial (2008–2012) — the definitive multisite RCT showing family-based CBT works for children as young as 5–8 with OCD. POTS Jr. transformed practice: family accommodation, parent coaching, and developmentally-tuned exposure became the default, not an afterthought.

Freeman is a member of the IOCDF Scientific & Clinical Advisory Board (verified directly on the IOCDF roster) and co-author of the standard Family-Based Treatment for Young Children With OCD therapist guide used in training programs internationally. Her current work focuses on dissemination — how to train community clinicians in exposure therapy, which is the single biggest treatment-access bottleneck. For a 13-year-old whose OCD started young and where family accommodation has become entrenched, the Brown/Bradley PARC model — where parents are the unit of treatment, not bystanders — is one of the most evidence-based options in the country.

Michael Bloch is Professor and Co-Director of the Tic and OCD Program at the Yale Child Study Center. He is also Co-Founder of Yale's Pediatric Depression Clinic, which matters because severe pediatric OCD almost always carries depressive comorbidity by adolescence. Bloch's research lab is one of the few places systematically testing novel-mechanism pharmacology for treatment-resistant pediatric OCD and Tourette: he has been principal investigator on registered ClinicalTrials.gov pediatric trials of N-acetylcysteine (NCT01172275, NCT01172288), cannabinoids in Tourette, and glutamate-modulating agents for OCD and anxiety.

Bloch is also Joint Editor of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (JCPP) — the highest-impact journal in his field — which makes him one of the small number of people who judge whether new pediatric OCD evidence is good enough to enter the literature. He has published 125+ peer-reviewed manuscripts and co-edited the 5th edition of the Lewis Textbook of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. For a family whose 13-year-old has failed SSRI trials and traditional CBT, Yale's program is one of a handful of academic centers in the world where enrollment in a novel-mechanism trial is realistically on the table.

Adam Lewin is Professor and Division Chief of Pediatric Neuropsychiatry at the University of South Florida and directs the behavioral treatment program at the Rothman Center, one of the few US sites running daily intensive ERP for severe and complex pediatric OCD. The Rothman Center has built its reputation on the cases other clinics decline: comorbid autism, suspected PANS/PANDAS, profound family accommodation, and prior treatment failures.

Lewin sits on the IOCDF Scientific & Clinical Advisory Board, has a Google Scholar h-index of 76 with 17,000+ citations, and is a prolific author on intensive ERP delivery for youth with severe OCD. His clinical practice routinely accepts out-of-state and international families for short-stay intensive blocks — a workable option when waitlists at Rogers or McLean OCDI Jr. stretch past 6 months.

David Mataix-Cols is Professor at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, where he leads the Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders Across the Lifespan research group. He served as advisor to the DSM-5 Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Sub-Work Group and is the architect of the diagnostic criteria for Hoarding Disorder — a phenotype that did not formally exist as a stand-alone diagnosis until his working group established it. His name appears on the principal classification papers for the ICD-11 OCRD chapter.

For a 13-year-old with rigid ritual circuits, what matters most about Mataix-Cols is his command of OCRD heterogeneity: he and his Karolinska group operate one of the world's only OCRD-focused population genetics and registry programs (using Sweden's nationwide health registers), giving him unmatched data on familial transmission, comorbidity patterns, suicide risk, and treatment trajectory. He has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2015–2017 and again in 2020 among Karolinska's list), with an h-index in the 70s+ range across major indices, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders. He is the European OCRD field's intellectual conscience — the person other researchers cite when defining what counts as OCD-spectrum.

Per Hove Thomsen is Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Aarhus University, Denmark, and was named coordinating clinical chair professor in psychiatry at Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital in 2014. He is one of the original initiators and a steering-group member of the Nordic Long-term OCD Treatment Study (NordLOTS) — a Denmark/Sweden/Norway collaboration that enrolled 269 children and adolescents into a 14-session stepped-care CBT protocol, with three-year follow-up showing that gains are sustainable.

NordLOTS matters because it is the largest pediatric OCD effectiveness trial conducted under real-world clinical conditions (as opposed to the more tightly-controlled POTS trials in US academic centers). The implication for families: the structured CBT-first protocol Thomsen helped build works outside the rarefied environments of MGH or UCLA — in community pediatric clinics. Thomsen is also listed in the WHO ICD-11 Working Group on the Classification of OCRD, alongside Stein, Fineberg, Simpson, and van den Heuvel — meaning he is one of the people whose committee work defines, internationally, what pediatric OCD is. His Aarhus group continues to publish remission and relapse data from the NordLOTS cohort.

Georgina Krebs is Associate Professor in Young Persons' Mental Health and CBT at UCL (Division of Psychology and Language Sciences) and held a clinical appointment for over 15 years at the National and Specialist OCD, BDD and Related Disorders Clinic for Young People at the Maudsley — the clinic founded by Isobel Heyman. She co-leads UCL's Anxiety, Self-Image and Mood (AIM) Lab and Clinic with Argyris Stringaris.

Krebs is the most cited UK researcher of her generation on pediatric body dysmorphic disorder — the OCRD that most commonly co-presents with OCD in adolescents and that is the most under-recognized in community CAMHS. She co-authored the 2024 Practitioner Review in JCPP that has become the standard reference for clinicians assessing youth BDD. In 2026 she joined an international team awarded £2.2 million in Wellcome funding to use AI for early OCD detection in children — a project that signals where the field is going. For a 13-year-old whose ritual circuits include appearance preoccupation, mirror-checking, or grooming compulsions that may be BDD-shaded rather than classic OCD, Krebs and the AIM Lab are the European specialist option.

Gerd Kvale, with Dr. Bjarne Hansen, developed the Bergen 4-Day Treatment (B4DT) — four consecutive days of group-format, 1:1 therapist-assisted concentrated ERP that delivers outcomes comparable to months of weekly therapy. The innovation earned Kvale and Hansen a spot on TIME Magazine's Health Care 50 in 2018. The 2024 Skjold et al. open trial in BMC Psychiatry demonstrated effectiveness specifically for adolescents with OCD.

Kvale is Professor at the University of Bergen and clinical director at Haukeland University Hospital, with a Google Scholar h-index of 51. The Bergen clinic itself only accepts patients with Norwegian healthcare rights — but the protocol has been disseminated internationally, including to the SoCal OCD Program in Los Angeles, which is certified to deliver B4DT for adolescents. For a family that needs the fastest possible structural response to entrenched ritual circuits, this is the option with the shortest time-to-treatment.

Susanne Walitza is Full Professor (Chair) and Medical Director of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (KJPD) at the University of Zurich, one of continental Europe's largest pediatric mental-health services. She holds a prominent leadership role in the International College of Obsessive Compulsive Spectrum Disorders (ICOCS) and is internationally recognized for her work on the genetics, neurobiology, and pharmacological treatment of early-onset OCD.

With a Google Scholar h-index of 80 and 27,000+ citations, Walitza is the most clinically active senior OCD researcher in German-speaking Europe. Her department is the natural reference point for German-speaking families with treatment-resistant pediatric OCD, and the KJPD service accepts international referrals via Zurich's standard tertiary referral process. For families considering combined pharmacology + intensive ERP at an academic European center outside the UK or Scandinavia, this is the strongest option.