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Biographies of Workshop Speakers
Kareemah Abdullah is the Director of the National Community Anti-Drug Coalition Institute (Institute) and the Vice President of Training Operations for Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA) in Alexandria, Virginia. The Institute established by Congress under the Drug-Free Communities Support Act is administered by the Executive Office of the President, Whitehouse Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and managed by the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Ms. Abdullah is responsible for executive and strategic direction of the Institute with an emphasis on the development of coalitions serving economically disadvantaged areas throughout the United States, territories, and tribal communities. As the Vice President for Training Operations, Ms. Abdullah is the chief architect for CADCA’s youth programs, featuring the National Youth Leadership Initiative (NYLI), military services including CADCA’s VetCorps Program, as well as fee-for-service operations. Ms. Abdullah also served as the Vice President for Development accountable for CADCA’s strategic partnership and resource procurement. For 7 years, she was the Institute’s Deputy Director for Training and Technical Assistance. Under her leadership, the National Coalition Academy was created in partnership with the National Guard Bureau and its Regional Counter-drug Training School Network. The Academy and other components of the Institute’s comprehensive national training delivery system, established by Ms. Abdullah, was designed to provide substantial support to communities throughout the nation. This drug demand reduction system represents the largest sustained training and technical assistance undertaking in CADCA’s, ONDCP’s and SAMHSA’s history. The Institute’s systems
change training model is used in local, state, regional and international settings. Previously, Ms. Abdullah, a Certified Prevention Specialist Level 4, served as Vice-President of the Board of Directors for the Prevention Credentialing Consortium for the State of Georgia and Chief Executive Officer of Genesis Prevention Coalition, Inc., based in Atlanta, Georgia. Additionally, she had a successful corporate career that spanned more than 20 years. Ms. Abdullah has presented papers internationally as a U.S. delegate on the Institute’s independently evaluated population-level change model and the highly acclaimed NYLI. She has acquired and leveraged millions of federal, state, local, and private dollars and other resources via contracts, grants, cooperative agreements, workforce development, and interagency collaborations. Ms. Abdullah is a distinguished administrator, master trainer, facilitator and coach, effective interviewer, broadcast moderator, talk show host, and keynote speaker.
Catherine Bradshaw, Ph.D., M.Ed., is a Professor and the Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia (UVA). Prior to her current appointment at UVA, she was an Associate Professor and the Associate Chair of the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She maintains an affiliation with Johns Hopkins as the Deputy Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-funded Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence and co-director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded Johns Hopkins Center for Prevention and Early Intervention. She holds a doctorate in developmental psychology from Cornell University and a master’s of education in counseling and guidance. She collaborates on research projects examining bullying and school climate; the development of aggressive and problem behaviors; effects of exposure to violence, peer victimization, and environmental stress on children; and the design, evaluation, and implementation of evidence-based prevention programs in schools. She received an award from President Obama in 2009 for her research on the use of evidence-based prevention programs in schools. She has co-authored more than 150 articles and chapters and presently collaborates on federally supported randomized trials of school-based prevention programs, including Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports and social-emotional learning curricula. She also has expertise in implementation science and coaching models. Dr. Bradshaw works with the Maryland State Department of Education and several school districts to support the development and implementation of programs and policies to prevent bullying and school violence, and to foster safe and supportive learning environments. She collaborates on federally funded research grants supported by NIMH, National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), CDC, U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of
Justice, and the Institute of Education Sciences. She has also consulted with the National Education Association, the United Nations, and the World Bank on issues related to bullying, mental health, and school-based prevention. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Research on Adolescence and the editor of Prevention Science, and co-editor of the Handbook of School Mental Health.
Richard Catalano, Ph.D., is the Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence and the co-founder of the Social Development Research Group in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington. For more than 30 years, he has led research and program development to promote positive youth development and prevent problem behavior. His work has focused on discovering risk and protective factors for positive and problem behavior, designing and evaluating programs to address these factors, and using this knowledge to understand and improve prevention service systems in states and communities. He has served on expert panels for the National Academy of Sciences, federal and state governments, and foundations. He has published more than 350 articles and book chapters and his work is highly cited (H factor of 50). His work has been recognized by practitioners (1996 National Prevention Network’s Award of Excellence); criminologists (Fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, 2007 August Vollmer Award from the American Society of Criminology, and 2003 Paul Tappan Award from the Western Society of Criminology); prevention scientists (2001 Prevention Science Award, 2012 Presidential Award from the Society for Prevention Research, President-elect of the Society for Prevention Research), and social workers (Fellow in the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare). Dr. Catalano is a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences. He is the codeveloper of the Social Development Model; the parenting programs Guiding Good Choices, Supporting School Success, Staying Connected with Your Teen, and Focus on Families; the school-based program, Raising Healthy Children; and the community prevention approach, Communities That Care.
Gregory Farber, Ph.D., has a B.S. in chemistry from Penn State University (1984) and received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1988). Dr. Farber’s research in graduate school involved determining the three dimensional structure and mechanism of the enzyme xylose isomerase in the laboratory of Dr. Gregory A. Petsko. After graduate school, Dr. Farber received a Life Sciences Research Fellowship to work on mechanistic enzymology with Dr. W. W. Cleland at the University of Wisconsin. Following his postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Farber returned to Penn State as an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and rose to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure by 1998. His research included work on
structural movies of enzyme action, molecular evolution, and mechanistic enzymology. Following a sabbatical year in the Division of Biological Infrastructure at the National Science Foundation, Dr. Farber decided to stay in government service. He moved to the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in 2000. At NCRR, he managed a number centers and individual investigator awards in technology development and bioinformatics, as well as a cohort of interdisciplinary research centers. Dr. Farber concluded his service at NCRR as the Director of the Office of Extramural Activities and the Director of the Office of Construction Grants. In June 2011, Dr. Farber became the Director of the Office of Technology Development and Coordination at NIMH. That office is responsible for coordinating all technology development and bioinformatics activities at NIMH, including common data element activities, overseeing the National Database for Autism Research, managing the NIMH component of the BRAIN Initiative, managing the Human Connectome project on behalf of the NIH Neuroscience Blueprint, and also overseeing the NIMH small business program.
Marion S. Forgatch, Ph.D., is Senior Scientist Emerita at the Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC), where she developed and tested programs for families with children at-risk or referred for child adjustment problems and substance abuse. In 2001, Dr. Forgatch founded Implementation Sciences International Inc. (ISII), a nonprofit affiliate of OSLC, to conduct implementation projects based on Parent Management Training, the Oregon Model (PMTO), a set of evidence-based practices developed and tested by the OSLC group. At ISII she serves as Executive Director and Director of Research. She and her team conduct large-scale implementations for systems providing services to families in child mental health and child welfare. Implementations include nationwide programs (Denmark, Iceland, The Netherlands, Norway), statewide programs (Kansas, Michigan), and citywide programs (Detroit, Mexico City, New York City). Since 2000, Dr. Forgatch and her team have adapted and applied the Parenting through Change (PTC) program for use with diverse populations, including non-English speaking Latinos, mothers living in shelters to escape homelessness or violence, parents whose children have been removed for reasons of abuse/neglect, and most recently for members of the National Guards reintegrating home following service in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Dr. Forgatch is co-author with Dr. Gerald R. Patterson of Parents and Adolescents, a set of books for parents and clinicians. She has also coauthored numerous journal articles, book chapters, and audio and video tapes for parents. A Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, Dr. Forgatch has received awards from the Society of Prevention Research (Friend of the Early Career Prevention Network in 2003 and Award for
International Collaborative Prevention Research in 2008) and the American Family Therapy Academy (Distinguished Contribution to Family Systems Research in 2012).
Carlos Gallo, Ph.D., is currently a Research Assistant Professor at the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computational Psycholinguistics from the University of Rochester followed by postdoctoral studies at Harvard University and the University of Miami. Dr. Gallo applies his expertise in bilingualism and natural language processing to developing computational methods for measuring fidelity in parent training prevention interventions.
Robert M. Goerge, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Fellow at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago with more than 30 years of research focused on improving the available data and information on children and families, particularly those who require specialized services related to maltreatment, disability, poverty, or violence. Dr. Goerge developed Chapin Hall’s Integrated Database on Child and Family Programs in Illinois, which links the administrative data on social service receipt, education, criminal and juvenile justice, employment, health care, and early childhood programs to provide a comprehensive picture of child and family use of publicly provided or financed service programs. His work provides high-quality information to policy makers to improve the programs serving children and their families. He is also the Principal Investigator of the National Survey of Early Care and Education. In addition to his Chapin Hall work, he is a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute, where he is co-Principal Investigator on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded grant entitled, “An Urban Sciences Research Coordination Network for Data-Driven Urban Design and Analysis.” He is the Executive Director of the Master’s Degree in Computational Analysis and Public Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Harris School for Public Policy Studies. He is a member of the Panel on Modernizing Crime Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Technical Work Group member of the National Study of Child and Adolescent Well-Being. Dr. Goerge received his Ph.D. from the School of Social Service Administration of the University of Chicago. He is also co-founder of the International Society for Child Indicators.
Rachel A. Gordon, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Associate Director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Gordon’s research broadly examines contextual, social, and policy factors that affect children and families. She has studied how child care and preschool quality affect child development, the relationships between youth gang participation and delinquency, the
association between community context and child well-being, the causes and consequences of grandmother coresidential support for young mothers, and an evaluation of an innovative job program for young couples. She is the author of two textbooks (Regression Analysis for the Social Sciences and Applied Statistics for the Social and Health Sciences) and has published her research in leading academic journals, including the American Journal of Evaluation, Child Development, Criminology, Demography, Developmental Psychology, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Journal of Research on Adolescence. Throughout her career, Dr. Gordon has worked at the intersection of academic research and social policy, including through directing the Illinois Family Impact Seminars. Her latest research has been funded by NIH and Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to examine the psychometric properties of widely used measures of preschool and child care quality, including the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale-Revised Edition (ECERS-R) and Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). She is also collaborating with the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning and the Washoe County School District (Reno, Nevada) to improve measurement of students’ social and emotional competencies using item response theory methods.
Kristen Kracke, M.S.W., is a Social Science Specialist for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), and serves as a senior technical expert in the area of juvenile justice systems improvement, evidence-based practice, research, and resource development specifically in the areas of youth justice, trauma, and children’s exposure to violence. In this role, she has worked in a range of capacities including research, performance management, strategic planning, training, and program development. Ms. Kracke has developed and currently manages a number of national reform efforts using data-informed practice. She has been leading the development of promising approaches in the field of juvenile justice and children’s exposure to violence for more than 20 years and has directed collaborative systems change efforts to improve policy and practice for children and families at both the federal and local levels.
Vetisha L. McClair, Ph.D., joined the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in 2012. She is a Research Analyst in the Research and Rapid Cycle Evaluation Group, Division of Research on Vulnerable Populations and Care Transformation. Dr. McClair leads the evaluation of many of CMMI’s mental health-related demonstrations, including a group of Healthcare Innovation Awards (HCIA) focused on behavioral health and substance abuse. The comprehensive evaluation of this diverse set of 10 awardees from the initial round of the HCIA initiative will yield findings with impor-
tant implications for public policies and programs that affect individuals with behavioral and substance use disorders. Dr. McClair also co-leads an interagency group organized by CMMI concentrated on the integration of behavioral health and primary care. Additionally, she provides consultation to CMMI and other CMS components in the development and evaluation of new mental health related projects. Her research interests relate to mental health service use and the effect of psychosocial/demographic factors on treatment outcomes. Previously, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Section on Developmental Genetic Epidemiology in NIMH after earning her Ph.D. and M.S. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her B.S. in Psychology from Howard University. She has also provided psychological services in a variety of settings (Veterans Administration Medical Centers, disability services, and out-patient hospitals) and is a licensed psychologist in the state of Maryland.
Robert Orwin, Ph.D., is a Senior Study Director in the Behavioral Health Group at Westat, with 30 years of experience in program evaluation and 20 years of experience in the issues of homelessness, mental health, substance abuse prevention, treatment, and policy. His expertise includes evaluation and survey research, research design, and data analysis. Dr. Orwin has directed research projects for SAMHSA; the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; NIDA; CDC; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; and various other agencies. He has directed or co-directed several multisite evaluations of services for individuals and families and was recently director of the cross-site evaluation of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention’s Strategic Prevention Framework. Dr. Orwin’s other research has included evaluations of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign and the effects of gender-sensitive substance abuse treatment on increasing employment and decreasing criminal justice involvement among women.
Jane Pearson, Ph.D., chairs the NIMH’s Suicide Research Consortium. She is the Associate Director for Preventive Interventions in the Division of Services and Intervention Research, and she currently leads the staffing for the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention Research Prioritization Task Force, which includes the implementation of the first prioritized research agenda for suicide prevention (www.suicide-research-agenda.org).Dr. Pearson serves as the NIH representative to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Federal Steering Group on Suicide Prevention.
Harold Alan Pincus, M.D., is Professor and Vice-Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and co-director of the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Columbia University and Director of Quality
and Outcomes Research at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Pincus also serves as a Senior Scientist at the RAND Corporation. Previously he was Director of the RAND-University of Pittsburgh Health Institute and Executive Vice Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, where he still maintains an adjunct professorship. He is the National Director of the Atlantic Philanthropies’ Health and Aging Policy Fellowship and previously directed the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s national program on Depression in Primary Care: Linking Clinical and Systems Strategies and the Hartford Foundation’s national program on Building Interdisciplinary Geriatric Research Centers. Dr. Pincus has also served as the Deputy Medical Director of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the founding director of APA’s Office of Research. Prior to joining APA, he was the Special Assistant to the Director of NIMH. Dr. Pincus graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and received his medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Following completion of residency at George Washington University Medical Center, Dr. Pincus was named a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar. As a Clinical Scholar, Dr. Pincus served as a professional staff member of the President’s Commission on Mental Health at the White House and, subsequently, as a congressional fellow in the U.S. House of Representatives. He has edited or co-authored 23 books and more than 350 scientific publications in health services research, science policy, research career development, and the diagnosis, classification, and treatment of mental disorders. Dr. Pincus has had a particular research interest in the practice of evidence-based medicine, quality improvement and the relationships among general medicine, mental health, and substance abuse, developing and empirically testing models of those relationships. He has led major health policy and services research and research training projects totaling more than $150 million in external funding. Dr. Pincus has chaired committees for NIH and served on several Institute of Medicine/ National Academy of Sciences committees, including Crossing the Quality Chasm in Behavioral Health and Cancer Care for the Whole Patient, as well as the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Disease Oversight Committee, World Psychiatric Association Section on Economics, Behavioral Measurement Advisory Panel of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, and numerous other national and international committees. He is chair of the Medicaid Task Force for the Measurement Applications Partnership, authorized under the Affordable Care Act; and he is co-chair of both the National Quality Forum Behavioral Health Steering Committee and the World Health Organization International Classification of Diseases 11th Revision (ICD-11) Committee on Quality and Patient Safety.
Lisa Saldana, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scientist at Oregon Social Learning Center. She is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) on the Stages of Implementation Completion for Evidence-Based Practice, an NIMH-funded R01 that examines the successful implementation of interventions in community settings. She also is working on NIH-funded research grants focusing on the economic evaluation of evidence-based practices and is a Co-Investigator on an NIDA-funded Translational Drug Abuse Prevention Center at the Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC). Dr. Saldana is a Co-Investigator on a large real-world implementation of two linked evidence-based programs in a large multisite child welfare system. In collaboration with colleagues, she developed the Stages of Implementation Completion (SIC) and Cost of Implementing New Strategies (COINS) implementation tools. Previously, she was a Co-Investigator on a large-scale trial awarded to Patricia Chamberlain evaluating “what it takes” to implement an evidence-based practice (MTFC) for youth in foster care in communities with barriers to implementation. This trial produced the SIC and COINS tools. Dr. Saldana also has a strong intervention development background. She was the PI of an NIDA-funded K award in which she developed the Families Actively Improving Relationships (FAIR) program, an intensive intervention for child welfare involved families with comorbid substance abuse, and currently is serving as PI on an efficacy trial of this intervention. She has collaborated with a number of other evidence-based practice developer groups and has been involved in development activities ranging from evaluation to creation of intervention principles and strategies. More recently her collaboration has strongly focused on development of implementation strategies to assist in increasing the uptake of successful practice. She and colleague Patricia Chamberlain are about to launch a large rollout of the R3 Supervisor Strategy as a means of infusing the use of evidence-based techniques throughout a statewide child welfare workforce.
Jeff Schiff, M.D., M.B.A., is the Medical Director for Minnesota Health Care Programs at the Minnesota Department of Human Services. This includes Minnesota’s Medicaid and Minnesota Care programs. He has served as medical director since June 2006. His work focuses on the development and implementation of evidence-based benefit policy, the advancement of improved care delivery models, and the improvement of clinical quality. Specific areas of interest include the development of policy to enhance the role of primary care and the provision of patient-centered medical homes; the use of collaborative intrastate processes to implement quality improvements across the health care system; and the use of claims and clinical data to report and improve health outcomes. The Minnesota Health Services Advisory Council, a physician-based policy advisory body for the development and implementation of evidence-based policy, is organized through
his office. Dr. Schiff is the current chair of the Medicaid Medical Directors network. In the network, he has co-chaired a 22-state project to measure the status of early elective delivery in these states. He has chaired a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) advisory group to identify perinatal topics to be considered for future funding. He has served as the co-chair of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) National Advisory Council Subcommittee on Children’s Healthcare Quality Measures for Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) programs. This subcommittee was charged with the identification of initial core set of children’s health care quality measures for voluntary use by Medicaid and CHIP Programs across the country. He has served as co-chair of the CMS expert panel on birth outcomes subcommittee that recommended Medicaid measures to improve prenatal and birth outcomes. Dr. Schiff has served as president of the Minnesota Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. His past administrative experience includes Medical Direction for Minnesota’s Emergency Medical Services for Children program. He practices clinically in pediatric emergency medicine.
Sarah Hudson Scholle, Dr.P.H., M.P.H., is Vice President of Research and Analysis for the National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA). Her research on measurement of practice systems and patient-centered care has informed the development and evaluation of NCQA’s Patient-Centered Medical Home program. She led a recent effort that led to the development of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey for patient-centered medical homes and currently heads a study to assess opportunities for incorporating shared decision making in accountable care organizations. Dr. Scholle leads one of seven Centers of Excellence in the AHRQ/CMS Pediatric Quality Measurement Program. She has extensive experience with measurement using multiple data sources including administrative claims and eligibility files, surveys, and most recently electronic health record data. Her research has focused on both content issues as well as technical issues such as reliability and validity of measures, as evidenced by her publication record. Dr. Scholle received her master’s degree in public health from Yale University and her doctorate in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Anne Sheridan is the Executive Director of the Maryland Governor’s Office for Children (GOC). The GOC works to promote health and wellness among youth, and seeks to address the priorities of Maryland’s children. Previously she served as the manager of the Maryland No Kid Hungry Campaign at Share Our Strength and co-chaired the Maryland Partnership to End Childhood Hunger where she helped to implement a statewide plan to meet partnership goals. Sheridan has years of community relations and
field operations experience, working as Corporate Director for Community Relations at Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc., as well as with the Kerry-Edwards Campaign in 2004, and as principal of the Dewey Square Group. Sheridan is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and received her B.A. in Economics and Government from Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts.
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