Robert Accordino is a physician, social entrepreneur, researcher, musician, and advocate. He has carried out significant advocacy work on behalf of children and adults with developmental conditions in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia and is a passionate champion of mental health parity for children and adults in our nation. In 2007, he was honored for service to individuals with autism and their families by Cherie Blair, wife of Former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Currently, Robert serves as Chief of Behavioral Health at Quartet Health, a technology company building user-centric products for primary care providers, mental health providers, and patients. Quartet endeavors to realize a society where mental health services are accessible, outcomes-driven, and integrated into primary care. In 2016, Robert was appointed by President Barack Obama to the White House Fellowship, a yearlong non-partisan program founded in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson to foster public service and leadership development. In this capacity, he advised the Secretaries of Defense, of the Obama and Trump Administrations, on health care delivery for service members and their families with a particular focus on increasing access to mental health care and decreasing the stigma of receiving such care.
Robert founded Music for Autism as a first year medical student and served as executive director until he graduated from medical school. During his tenure, the charity’s fully subsidized programs spread nationwide, from Boston to Los Angeles.
A Fulbright Scholar, Robert graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University. He earned an M.Sc. in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University and an M.D. from Mount Sinai School of Medicine with Distinction in Research and Medical Education and as a member of the Arnold Gold Humanism in Medicine Honor Society. Board certified in general psychiatry, he completed a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General and McLean Hospital of Harvard Medical School and a residency in general psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital of Weill Cornell Medical College. Robert continues to practice child, adolescent and adult psychiatry and is a member of the faculty of Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Throughout his medical career, Robert has actively engaged in clinical research resulting in over 35 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters and articles and over 60 conference, seminar and grand rounds presentations.
Robert is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service (2017), the Star Family Prize for Excellence in Advising at Harvard College (2016), the Laughlin Fellowship (2015), New Yorker of the Week (2014), a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship (2003), a research grant from the Bailey Thomas Charitable Trust in the United Kingdom (2004), a grant from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation (2008), the Eugene J. Collins Memorial Scholarship for medical school (2007), the Sigma Xi Prize for Excellence in Research at Princeton University (2003), the Spirit of Princeton Award for service to fellow students (2002), and the Medical Society of the State of New York Community Service Award (2011). His written work regularly appears in The Huffington Post where he is a blogger on medicine and social justice.
In 2009, he was one of only 15 medical students in the country to receive the American Medical Association Foundation Leadership Award for outstanding leadership and service. Robert has served on the Alumni Advisory Board of the Coca Cola Scholars Foundation, the Advisory Board of The Miracle Project, and the Friends and Faculty Committee of Weill Cornell Medical College’s Music and Medicine Initiative.
