Maxine Harris is Co-Founder and Board Chair of Community Connections, a private, not-for-profit mental health agency in Washington, DC. She is also the Executive Director of The National Capital Center for Trauma Recovery and Empowerment.

In the past several years, Community Connections has specialized in gender-specific approaches to treating women and men, trauma survivors, homeless persons, and substance abusers. Dr. Harris, in collaboration with investigators from Dartmouth Medical School, has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on numerous federally funded grant projects including: A Randomized Controlled Study of the Trauma Recovery and Empowerment Model (TREM) & PTSD (funded by National Institutes of Mental Health), the DC Trauma Collaboration Study funded under the Women, Co-Occurring Disorders and Violence Study (funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), and several other federally funded grants to study homeless women, substance-addicted homeless persons, to implement vocational services for persons with serious mental illness, and a youth violence prevention project providing trauma services for adolescent girls.

Dr. Harris is the author of numerous articles and several books including, "Trauma Recovery and Empowerment: A Clinician's Guide to Working with Women in Groups" (The Free Press, Fall 1998) and "The Loss That is Forever - The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father" (The Penguin Group, 1995), which focuses on the often ignored trauma of losing a parent in childhood. She is co-author of "Healing the Trauma of Abuse: A Woman's Workbook" (New Harbinger Publishers, 2000), contributing author and co-editor (with Roger D. Fallot) of Using Trauma Theory to Design Service Systems, New Directions for Mental Health Services #89 (Jossey-Bass, Spring 2001).

Most recently Dr. Harris authored "The Twenty-four Carat Buddha and Other Fables: Stories of Self Discovery," a collection of fables inspired by the stories of women with whom she has worked. Her latest book is currently available from Rowman & Littlefield.