Pamela J. Buck, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and DBT Linehan Board of CertificationโCertified Clinician with extensive international experience in clinical training, supervision, and program development. She serves as a Staff Psychologist and Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Boston Child Study Center and is a Lecturer of Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Across her roles, Dr. Buck is deeply committed to strengthening trauma informed, culturally responsive mental health systems and supporting clinicians working in diverse cultural, linguistic, and resource settings.
Dr. Buck specializes in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and trauma focused treatments, including DBT Prolonged Exposure, DBT PTSD, Cognitive Processing Therapy, and Prolonged Exposure Therapy. In addition to her clinical work, she has held senior leadership roles at the Portland DBT Institute, where she directed specialty PTSD programs, supervised multidisciplinary teams, and supported high standards of ethical and model adherent practice. Her teaching and consultation style emphasizes practical skill development, reflective practice, and thoughtful adaptation of evidence based treatments to local cultural values, clinical systems, and community needs.
Dr. Buckโs professional path reflects a longstanding commitment to global mental health and cross cultural collaboration. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Duke University. She has extensive academic and field experience across South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. She has worked extensively in refugee and immigrant mental health and in training clinicians and community based and paraprofessional providers internationally. Dr. Buck is fluent in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian, with additional proficiency in Arabic, Japanese, Thai, Russian, and German. She regularly provides DBT training, consultation, and supervision to clinicians and teams throughout the United States and South and Southeast Asia, approaching this work with cultural humility, curiosity, and respect for locally grounded knowledge and practice.