FERRIDAY &8212; Debra DePrato remembers introducing herself to her fellow medical residents during orientation at Yale University.

&8220;Everybody was either from the east coast &8212; Boston or Connecticut &8212; or from California,&8221; she said. &8220;When it was my turn, I got up and said, &8216;I&8217;m from Ferriday, Louisiana.&8217; I was the only one.&8221;

Though back in Louisiana since the end of the one-year forensic psychiatry residency program in 1992, the third of the late J.L. DePrato Jr. and Kitty Vogt DePrato&8216;s&8217; four children still sticks out.

In fact, DePrato was recently singled out by the John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation to lead &8220;Models for Change,&8221; its juvenile justice reform initiative.

The foundation has granted Louisiana $7.5 million over five years to help it identify and accelerate promising state models for reform.

The state is one of four &8212; Illinois, Pennsylvania and Washington are the others &8212; the foundation found doing promising enough reform on its own to merit its assistance.

DePrato will serve as project director and the Louisiana Board of Regents will be the lead entity to administer the grant money. It will work as formal partners with the LSU System.

&8220;The person who directs this initiative is what we call our local partner and will play a critical role in its success,&8221; said Laurie Garduque, a MacArthur Foundation representative who will oversee the initiative.

&8220;We wanted someone known for being in a leadership position and had a track record in achieving systems change.&8221;

In DePrato, the foundation found its person.

DePrato joined the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans in 1992. Her work as a forensic psychiatrist had her in close contact with the people the state has committed to help.

She was so effective in Jefferson Parish that, in 2000, she was appointed director of the medical, mental health and dental program the LSUHSC administered through the Office of Youth Development.

This appointment was a move by the state to overhaul the juvenile justice system in the state.

The move &8212; backed strongly by Gov. Kathleen Blanco &8212; was spurred by a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit filed against the state in 1998. The suit stemmed from an investigation that found conditions in the state&8217;s juvenile correctional facilities to be grossly lacking.

And DePrato, with her training as a forensic and child psychiatry background and her practical experience, got the nod to fix it.

And while she couldn&8217;t comment on the specifics of the lawsuit, DePrato said the state has made great strides in the reform effort.

&8220;There&8217;s been a change in philosophy,&8221; she said. &8220;Putting juveniles in prison is now the last thing to try, not the first thing.&8221;

Those strides are what attracted the MacArthur Foundation to Louisiana, Garduque said.

&8220;They used the crisis as an opportunity to address problems with the juvenile judicial system,&8221; she said. &8220;The state showed a good-faith effort.&8221;

Although a little bit awed by the task ahead of her, DePrato said she knows she&8217;ll have access to the resources of the board of regents, which will contract her services through LSU.

&8220;They&8217;re an exciting board and they have so many resources,&8221; she said. &8220;Whatever we do, there&8217;s a college or a university there we can team up with.&8221;

DePrato will be in charge of finding different juvenile justice projects around the state that are successful and either help make them more successful or develop ways to spread their success to other areas.

She said she, along with regents, will spend the next six to eight months developing a plan to determine where the first round of grants will go.

&8220;We&8217;re looking to build on strengths and assets,&8221; Garduque said. &8220;We&8217;ll come in and say, &8216;You&8217;re doing good work, let us help you take it to the next level.&8217;&8221;