John Petrila is Senior Policy Advisor to the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute, which provides independent, nonpartisan and data-driven policy and program guidance to communities across Texas and to state policymakers on behavioral health issues. He received his law degree and an advanced degree in mental health law from the University of Virginia School of Law. He was the first Fellow in Law and Psychiatry at UVA’s Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy, and the first Forensic Director in the state of Missouri. He served as General Counsel and Deputy Commissioner in the New York State Office of Mental Health from 1984-1992. From 1992-2016, he was a tenured full professor at the University of South Florida, serving as Chair of the Department of Mental Health Law & Policy in the Florida Mental Health Institute and Chair of the Department of Health Policy & Management at the College of Public Health. In both settings, he developed and oversaw data teams for the analysis of large archival data sets such as Medicaid and hospital admission data. From 2016 to 2022 he was Executive Vice President for Adult Policy at Meadows, where he oversaw the Institute’s adult and justice-related work as well as its data team.

He is co-author of 3 books and more than 100 papers, chapters, and monographs and is co-author of Psychological Evaluations for the Courts (Guilford Press, 5th edition 2026), a foundational text in training forensic practitioners since its initial publication in 1987. He is past President of the International Association of Forensic Mental Health Services, was a Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands, where he taught and conducted research in the Maastricht University Forensic Psychology Program, and was a Trustee with Trust Insurance for nine years before joining the TRMS Board.