Margaret Benningfield, MD, MSc
Dr. Meg Benningfield is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Human Development in Peabody College. She serves as Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Dr. Benningfield is a graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and pursued clinical training in psychiatry at Harvard where she completed residency in General Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospitals and a fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital. In 2008, she joined the faculty at Vanderbilt where she has pursued an academic career balanced between research, education, and clinical practice with a focus in prevention of addiction.
Clinical Interests
Acute care for children and adolescents including inpatient, partial hospital, and emergency settings; integration of behavioral health in pediatric primary care; impact of developmental trauma on family systems
Research Information
Dr. Benningfield is a Child Psychiatrist whose primary interest lies in early intervention and prevention of mental illness including substance use disorders.
This work has used functional MRI to examine neurobiological factors related to vulnerability for addiction including impulsivity, risk taking and reward processing. Impulsivity and risk taking are both determinants and consequences of persistent substance use. Reward mechanisms are fundamental to facilitating the learning processes that mediate drug dependence. Understanding the neurobiology related to reward processing, impulsivity, and risk taking in adolescents and how these factors relate to one another is essential for informing prevention and treatment of substance use disorders.
Dr. Benningfield is also interested in how early interventions, like those implemented in our school based mental health program, impact substance use trajectories in youth with psychiatric illness.