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Throughout her career, Christina Tortolani, Ph.D., has worn many hats. Most often, she balances more than a few at any given time. Tortolani is a practicing psychologist who specializes in treating adolescents and young adults struggling with trauma and eating disorders; a researcher; a professor; and, as of 2024, the director of the new Doctor of Clinical Psychology (Psy.D.) program at ���Ĵ�ý.

Most importantly, however, Tortolani is an advocate for her community’s well-being.

“I feel that, as healthcare providers, we should help make sure our community can access treatments that work,” she says.

To accomplish this herculean task, Tortolani often finds herself thinking outside the box and taking on responsibilities that fall outside a clinician’s typical duties. Over the course of her career, she’s helped other clinicians build their efficacy, worked to challenge stigmas, and advocated for the populations she serves to not just overcome their illnesses, but also find a true sense of healing and well-being.

Now, she’s funneling that energy into shaping ���Ĵ�ý’s new Psy.D. program into something truly unique and impactful.

Building Efficacy in Rhode Island’s Eating Disorder Recovery Community

While Tortolani has studied and worked in a range of therapeutic areas, the main focus of her career has been making science-based treatments for eating disorders more accessible to people in Rhode Island and surrounding states. 

“Christina is a formidable force in the landscape of eating disorder care in Rhode Island and across southern New England,” says colleague Abigail Donaldson, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics at Brown University and medical director of the Eating Disorder Program at Hasbro Children’s Hospital. “She has worked in all levels of eating disorder care available at Hasbro Children’s and has successfully and persistently implemented community-based programming that extends well beyond the reach of the Brown University Health system. 

“Christina has been a leader in establishing and maintaining available services in our state that are at the forefront of evidence-based care. She’s also incredibly generous with her time, providing consultation, supervision, and collaboration in clinical care, training, and research initiatives. Our eating disorder treatment community is so much stronger because of her presence and ongoing leadership.”

Establishing a Place at Hasbro Children’s Hospital

During her graduate studies at Boston College and Northeastern University in Boston, Tortolani honed her skills in evidence-based interventions that ranged from dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) to cognitive processing therapy (CPT) while participating in practicums across a range of settings, including schools, colleges, community clinics, and hospitals. 

But Tortolani discovered her true passion at one particular training site.

“The most formative and powerful clinical placement that I had was at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in the Partial Hospital Program,” she says. “As one of the leading hospital-based programs in the country, it specializes in integrated medical and psychological care. It was such a special place, one that truly shaped who I am as a psychologist—largely because of the incredible mentorship and depth of clinical work. I still think of it as one of my professional ‘homes,’ and many of the mentors who guided me then have since become close colleagues, research collaborators, and friends.”

That placement, along with her interactions with local eating disorder experts, led to her deep involvement in family-based therapy (FBT) for eating disorders. Over the last decade, in addition to becoming a certified FBT provider, she’s trained other professionals to facilitate FBT; secured funding for and conducted research on this approach, which is considered the gold standard; and helped mental health teams integrate FBT into their continuums of care. 

Diving Deep Into Family-Based Therapy

While it’s not unheard of for a clinical professional to delve into so many aspects of their specialties, it’s certainly unique.

“Something about FBT immediately resonated with me—it just made sense to think about food as medicine, to separate the illness from the person and to empower parents to help re-nourish their child’s body and brain,” says Tortolani. “Like many others in the field, I found myself rethinking how I understood eating disorders and how recovery happens within families. After that, I dove in—seeking out specialized training, becoming certified in FBT, and working with colleagues to bring the model to Hasbro’s eating disorder program. It’s work that continues to feel deeply meaningful to me.”

Donaldson is not the only colleague to emphasize the impact of Tortolani’s contributions.

“Implementing FBT at Hasbro marked a meaningful shift in how we care for patients with eating disorders,” says Diane DerMarderosian, M.D., clinical professor of pediatrics/psychiatry and human behavior at Brown Medical School and director of the Pediatric Med/Psych Division at Hasbro Children’s. “Christina played a vital role in embedding the model across all levels of care and still serves as a trusted trainer, educator, and supervisor for our teams. Her impact reaches far beyond our hospital, though, as she has helped several community mental health centers develop FBT-informed teams.  

“For example, Christina helped to train an outpatient eating disorder team at Gateway Healthcare to provide FBT to families in their homes. By offering treatment in Spanish and delivering it directly in the home, we were able to reduce common barriers such as language, transportation, and financial constraints. This has not only increased the number of clinicians equipped to treat eating disorders, it has also helped more children and families get the care they need, particularly those who might not otherwise receive specialized care.”

Overcoming Misperceptions About Eating Disorders

During her journey, Tortolani has encountered many obstacles, such as limited resources. However, in her opinion, some of the most difficult obstacles to overcome are the misguided beliefs about eating disorders.

“Eating disorders are highly stigmatized and misunderstood both by the clinical medical community and the larger public,” she says. In her experience, eating disorders are often thought of as a trivial adolescent phase, a lifestyle choice, or an illness that a person is stuck with for their entire life.  

While it may be no surprise that the general public often fosters such ideas about eating disorders, Tortolani says the clinical community has its own stigmas about the illness as well. She has been providing interdisciplinary training in eating disorders for over a decade, and she often hears the same message, whether from trainees or seasoned clinicians: “‘We are not getting trained in EDs, we don’t understand them, and therefore we don’t want to care for them,’” she says. “That really engenders a bleak negative response and perpetuates misunderstanding and ineffective treatment. So, it became my mission to change this.” 

For that reason, even though Tortolani’s campaign to bring family-based treatment to communities across Rhode Island has been largely successful, she continues to conduct research, supervise trainees, and build efficacy among her colleagues.  

“My research is about taking science that has been developed and tested in ivory tower settings and adapting it to the front lines, that is, real-world clinical settings,” she says. “My hope is that by educating the community about EDs as treatable, brain-based illnesses, we can provide a more compassionate and helpful response from both treatment providers and families of those with eating disorders.”

Giving Young Patients Their Identities Back

As damaging as stigma from medical professionals, family members, and society at large can be, eating disorders also often come with the painful feelings of guilt and shame. According to Tortolani, helping patients through these existential feelings is just as important as modifying their behaviors and treating their medical symptoms.

As a clinical professional, Tortolani employs evidence-based interventions when working with her patients. She has found that pairing this work with art, journaling, and stories of recovery facilitates healing. While there are fantastic books that can help people through the recovery process in their everyday lives, they are primarily aimed at adults.

With that gap in mind, Tortolani partnered with two of her colleagues, Melissa Freizinger of Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School and Renee Rienecke of Galen Hope and Northwestern University, and wrote a book aimed at teens and young adults called Disobey: Finding Freedom from your Eating Disorder.

“‘Disobey’ means to disobey your eating disorder’s rules,” she says. “We wanted it to be something that is accessible, that is practical, but is also grounded in science and recovery narratives. It’s both skills-based and provides opportunities for reflection and inspiration.”

Due out in mid 2026, Disobey is a departure from the peer-reviewed research papers Tortolani often writes, but, despite her clinical identity, she says she is a creative at heart. To her, harnessing that energy to help the population she serves is a natural extension of her duty as a clinical professional. “I hope our readers feel seen in these stories, find hope in the shared experiences, and are inspired to claim their own freedom,” she says.

Crafting ���Ĵ�ý’s New Psy.D. Program

Tortolani consistently goes to great lengths not just to serve her patients but also to bolster Rhode Island’s mental health care community. When she came to ���Ĵ�ý in 2024, she teamed up with her new colleagues, including Joe Trunzo, professor and associate director of the School of Health and Behavioral Sciences, to create a Psy.D. program that would help equip students to do the same.

Under Tortolani’s leadership, Bryant’s new Psy.D. program has added more courses focused on applied clinical skills and hired more faculty members, including a new director of clinical training and a research director. The program also has started the multiyear process to become fully accredited by the American Psychological Association and opened its new .

“We want our program to be community-based,” Tortolani says. “We’ve been thoughtful around how our curriculum is embedded within the Rhode Island behavioral health community.”

To that end, Tortolani and her colleagues have structured the program so students spend the summer after their second year in a research lab within the community, whether at nearby Brown Medical School, a community mental health clinic, or a local school. Bryant is also one of only a few schools that offer an entirely research-focused practicum.

Learn New Clinical Skills in a Collaborative, Rapidly Evolving Community

Even though ���Ĵ�ý’s Doctor of Clinical Psychology program admitted its first 21-student cohort only last year, Christina Tortolani, PhD, and her colleagues are already thinking of ways it can expand to meet the needs of its students and the community at large.

“Bryant is a school with a rich tradition in business education,” she says of ���Ĵ�ý in general. “So I think we need to leverage that business acumen that’s all around us. Healthcare is a business, for better or for worse. We can be practicing clinicians but we can also be leaders in healthcare who are fixing or mending the systems that are broken.”

To find out how ���Ĵ�ý can help you expand your clinical expertise in new directions, request more information today.