Meet Chitra
Chitra Ramaswamy is a New Jersey and New York State Licensed and Board Certified Behavior Analyst whose work sits at the intersection of medicine and behavior science. She earned her MBBS in Mumbai, India and trained in a hospital setting that exposed her to a wide range of cases across family medicine and psychiatry — including anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia — in both inpatient and outpatient care. Her interest in the brain and behavior, however, long predates that training. Helping care from childhood for a family member with schizophrenia, alongside time spent with a friend on the spectrum, gave her an early and durable curiosity about how cognition and regulation work — a curiosity she still finds herself applying everywhere, including her special-needs cats. During her Master of Public Health at George Washington University, she studied individual and community-level outcomes and researched whether rising autism prevalence reflected a true increase or expanded diagnostic recognition — a question that drew her toward direct clinical work. Chitra completed her Post-Master’s VCS sequence in Applied Behavior Analysis at the Florida Institute of Technology and has since worked as an ABA specialist in in-home and community-based settings in Northern New Jersey and also consults at Manhattan Psychology Group. Alongside her clinical practice, she carries an ongoing research interest in neurodivergence and trauma responses across both human and feline brains that she aims to carry into dedicated research.
Bringing a clinician’s lens to behavior analytic work, Chitra supports children and adolescents with profiles including autism, ADHD, PTSD, generalized anxiety, PDA, childhood apraxia of speech, and gestalt language processing. She is skilled in functional communication training across vocal, augmentative, and low-tech modalities, including AAC implementation for nonverbal learners, and she designs individualized programs centered on emotional regulation, coping skills, and improving psychological flexibility. Her intervention repertoire spans Natural Environment Teaching, Discrete Trial Training, Relational Frame Theory, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. She also conducts Functional Behavior Assessments and utilizes a variety of assessment tools as per her clients’ needs, and she collaborates closely with speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists on overlapping goals.
Chitra takes a trauma-informed, assent-based, and neurodiversity-affirming approach to ABA, prioritizing learner dignity, autonomy, and emotional safety alongside evidence-based programming. She integrates medical insight with contemporary behavior analytic frameworks to design humane, individualized supports that strengthen functional communication and promote meaningful quality-of-life outcomes. Chitra deeply values collaboration with caregivers and interdisciplinary teams, and she offers culturally responsive parent training and ACT-based caregiver coaching to empower families to generalize skills beyond the therapy session.
Dr. Chitra Ramaswamy, MBBS, MPH, LBA, BCBA
Licensed Applied Behavior Analyst (NJ NJ #15BC00350400)
Chitra offers:
