Kristine Santoro, PhD

Kristine Santoro, PhD

Chief Operating Officer

Dr. Kristine Santoro is the Chief Operating Officer at Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services. A licensed psychologist, Dr. Santoro is passionately dedicated to improving the quality of client care and making Didi Hirsch an employer of choice.

In 2001, Dr. Santoro received her doctorate in Psychology from UCLA, which included a year in Didi Hirsch’s APA-accredited doctoral internship training program. Subsequently, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center where she received specialized experience in child psychology and assessment.

In 2002, Dr. Santoro returned to Didi Hirsch where she has taken on increasingly complex leadership roles. Prior to her current role, she was the Division Director of Training, overseeing all agency staff and internship training programs, and then Vice President of Quality and Innovation, which encompasses Quality Improvement, Research & Evaluation, Training and Grants. Her areas of specialization include psychological testing services, assessment of traumatized children placed in foster care, and services for at-risk children in the agency’s Birth-to-Five program.

Dr. Santoro has expertise in clinical services, training and research. Over the course of her career, she has published on topics such as memory, information-processing, and psychophysics and worked as a faculty instructor at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where she taught psychiatry residents Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy with Children & Adolescents. She also is an active member of the American Psychological Association.

Her dedication to the field is strongly shaped by her own early experiences, when her family took in and fostered children from much less fortunate circumstances. One later took his life through suicide.