TACHL Leadership

Dr. Ken Ruggiero, TACHL Director

Dr. Ruggiero’s work centers on improving access and quality of mental health care to vulnerable and underserved populations, particularly children and adults who have been affected by traumatic events such as disasters, serious injury, child abuse, and occupational incidents. This includes research on self-help apps for disaster victims (bouncebacknow.org) in collaboration with the American Red Cross, technology-enhanced treatments for survivors of traumatic injury (trrphealth.org), and resources for firefighters who experience critical incidents (cffbh.org). He also leads an initiative (sparktoolkit.org) to improve quality of behavioral health care in partnership with over 30 youth-serving community mental health centers in the Carolinas and Florida. These initiatives have resulted in over 200 scholarly publications and have been supported by the National Institutes of Health, Department of Homeland Security, Veterans Administration, and MUSC Center for Telehealth.