Harold Koplewicz

In 1996, Dr. Koplewicz became the chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University Medical Center (now the N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center), and a year later founded the N.Y.U. Child Study Center, where he remained for 12 years. Over the course of his tenure he, along with Ms. Brooke Garber Neidich, who was chairwoman of the board (and now holds that position at Child Mind Institute), raised about $142 million for the N.Y.U. Child Center, he said. In 2009, Dr. Koplewicz left N.Y.U. to start the Child Mind Institute, which has been operating since last November, but which officially opened May 3. The 24,000-square-foot office is equipped with video and computer equipment, a built-in TV studio and the latest in brain imaging technology. Its Web site, childmind.org, is edited by Caroline Miller, the former editor of New York magazine; there are 14 clinicians on staff. According to Dr. Koplewicz, once he announced his resignation, N.Y.U. forbade him from entering his office and it pushed out professors who had said they wanted to join him at Child Mind Institute. Twelve other N.Y.U. professors and the majority of the Child Study Center’s board of directors, which included not just Ms. Garber Neidich and her husband, Daniel, but also the Tribeca Film Festival founders Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff; Anne McNulty, managing partner of JBK Partners; and Claude Wasserstein, an ex-wife of the financier Bruce Wasserstein, also followed Dr. Koplewicz to the Child Mind Institute. Dr. Koplewicz takes his fund-raising so seriously that he sees very few patients himself, which is how he explained his high rates (he will occasionally work pro bono, and other clinicians at the center offer sliding scales). A graduate of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Dr. Koplewicz completed his psychiatric residency at New York Hospital Westchester Division, a fellowship in child psychiatry at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, an NIMH research fellowship in child psychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and the Executive Program in Health Policy and Management at Harvard University’s School of Public Health.