Cecilia Frometa, PhD

Dr. Frometa is a Lead Consultant to the CONNECTing Children and Families to Care Project (plan4Children.org), which is a federally awarded SAMHSA Systems of Care grant focused on engaging multiple stakeholders from various child and family serving sectors to create a more cohesive family driven child mental health system in Connecticut. 

The CONNECT initiative is focused on the implementation of the Connecticut Behavioral Health Plan for Children (Public Act 13-178).  She leads the Cultural and Linguistic Appropriate Services (CLAS) portion of the CONNECT grant with the purpose of ensuring the child and family agencies across CT align organizational missions and visions to reflect culturally responsive care.   

Dr. Frometa is a Consultant at the Child Health and Development Institute (CHDI) Inc where she leads training for the Connecticut Mobile Crisis Teams on providing Culturally Responsive Care.  

She obtained her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Northeastern University and completed her pre-doctoral clinical internship training at Harvard Medical School/Department of Medical Affairs with a clinical focus on trauma related disorders.  She additionally completed her post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University.       

She has been in the mental health field for over 25 years and has extensive clinical, teaching, mentoring, program development, consultation and supervisory experience. Her current research interests include understanding clinical engagement challenges of the underserved and multi-risk populations.   Dr. Frometa focuses her teaching on building skills to improve culturally responsive mental health assessment, treatment and trauma-informed care.