President, International Trauma Center
Dr. Robert Macy was trained as a theatre artist, Taoist martial artist, dance movement therapist (DMT), traumatologist, and neuroscience researcher with over 30 years practice in the field of body-based psychological trauma interventions, disaster medicine and the design, development, dissemination and implementation of trauma informed care assessment and intervention service delivery systems in the United States and overseas.
Dr. Macy and Dicki Johnson Macy, BC-DMT, LMHC, M.Ed., have devoted the last two decades to the design, development and implementation of DMT-based interventions for youth and communities exposed to violence and extreme stress events. Dr. Macy is the Founder and President of the International Trauma Center-Boston, as well as the Co-Founder, with Dicki Macy, and Executive Director of The Boston Children’s Foundation. Dr. Macy is a member of the SAMHSA Disaster Technical Assistance Center (DTAC) and works nationally to assist SAMHSA in disaster response and recovery.
Dr. Macy is a founding member of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), where he is a primary content provider for the development of Psychological First Aid, (PFA) and Skills for Psychological Recovery (SPR), and was instrumental in the design and development of NCTSN network products during its first 8 years. He has co-chaired the NCTSN Terrorism and Disaster Network Committee and led numerous response and behavioral health recovery teams during national and international disasters.
Dr. Macy was one of only 12 experts in the nation to be selected to membership for the Barack Obama commissioned Attorney General’s Federal Advisory Commission on Children Exposed to Violence as part of Attorney General Eric Holder’s broader Defending Childhood Initiative.
Dr. Macy has devoted a significant portion of his career to work with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to develop customized somatic-focused protocols for reducing suicide, depression, PTSD and vicarious trauma among field officers and in the SpecOps community. His work has included consulting, training and psychosocial intervention partnerships with the U.S. Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security-New Jersey, the Maine State Police and the Boston Police Department.
Dr. Macy is a tireless pioneer in the field of psychological trauma, psychosocial recovery and resiliency in research, interventions and violence prevention initiatives for children, youth, their families, and adults and their communities exposed to traumatic events including large-scale disasters, terrorist events, and political, school based, community and armed conflict violence. Dr. Macy and Dicki Macy continue to successfully utilize their somatocognitive-based trauma informed care continuums across early childhood settings, elementary, middle and high school settings, child welfare settings, foster care settings and juvenile justice settings.
Dr. Macy, Dicki Macy and colleagues, working with international donors over the last 15 years, designed, developed and have launched school focused-evidence based, highly structured, expressive therapy- psychosocial intervention programs, known as the Classroom-Community-Culture Based Intervention-CBI® services continuum, for children and youth exposed to suicide, homicide, community violence, armed conflict and mass casualty natural disasters. These DMT/ET CBI® service continuum programs have been successfully implemented in 11 states and 13 countries under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. As of January 2014, over 580,000 youth have completed the CBI® service continuum programs. Between August 2008 and April 2014, Dr. Macy and colleagues affiliated with the International Trauma Center have published tweleve cluster controlled randomized trials of CBI® in leading peer reviewed journals indicating strong positive effects in multiple domains. These are the first psychosocial interventions for large scale trauma focusing on children and families to be published in the literature.
Dr. Macy is affiliated with Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital, Developmental Psychopathology. Macy designs, implements and evaluates trauma focused psychosocial resiliency initiatives, violence prevention programs, and Trauma Informed Care initiatives in the United States, Europe, Middle East, Eurasia and Africa. He has specialized in school and community based trauma focused assessments and interventions assisting school districts in building infrastructure to respond to trauma, sudden fatalities and disasters impacting students, parents and staff.
International Trauma Center 