Advisory Board

Professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School

James M. Perrin, MD, is professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and former director of the Division of General Pediatrics at the MassGeneral Hospital for Children and associate chair of pediatrics for research at MGH.  He holds the John C. Robinson Chair in Pediatrics and founded the MGH Center for Child and Adolescent Health Policy, a multidisciplinary research and training center with an active fellowship program in general pediatrics, and directed the center for over 15 years.  He is president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, former chair of its Committee on Children with Disabilities, and past president of the Ambulatory (Academic) Pediatric Association.  For the American Academy of Pediatrics, he also co-chaired a committee to develop practice guidelines for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and then a group advising the AAP on the implementation of the guidelines. His research has examined asthma, middle ear disease, children’s hospitalization, health insurance, and childhood chronic illness and disabilities, with recent emphases on epidemiology of childhood chronic illness and organization of services for the care of children and adolescents with chronic health conditions.  He headed the Clinical Coordinating Center (based at the MGH) for the national Autism Speaks Autism Treatment Network and directs the Autism Intervention Research Network on Physical Health, a multisite collaborative aiming to improve evidence-based care for children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders.  He also directed the Evidence Working Group reporting to the Maternal and Child Health Bureau for the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Heritable Disorders and Genetic Diseases in Newborns and Children.  Dr. Perrin was the founding editor of Academic Pediatrics (formerly known as Ambulatory Pediatrics), the journal of the Academic Pediatric Association.

Dr. Perrin has served on Institute of Medicine Committees on Maternal and Child Health under Health Care Reform, Quality of Long-Term-Care Services in Home and Community-Based Settings, Enhancing Federal Healthcare Quality Programs, and Disability in America; the National Commission on Childhood Disability; and the Disability Policy Panel of the National Academy of Social Insurance.  His experience includes two years in Washington working on rural primary care development and migrant health.  After his fellowship at the University of Rochester, he developed and ran a rural community health center in farming communities between Rochester and Buffalo.

He received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research.  He also served as a member of the National Advisory Council for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.  A graduate of Harvard College and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, he had his residency and fellowship training at the University of Rochester and has also been on the faculties of the University of Rochester and Vanderbilt University.