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Biographical Sketches of Workshop Presenters and Planning Committee Members
William Beardslee (Planning Committee Member) directs the Baer Prevention Initiatives at Boston Children’s Hospital. He also serves as a senior research scientist at the Judge Baker Children’s Center and as the distinguished Gardner-Monks Professor of Child Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. His research interest centers on the development of children at risk due to parental adversities such as mental illness or poverty. His work is focused on the ways in which self-awareness and shared understanding help individuals and families cope with adversity. He currently directs the Boston site of a multisite study on the prevention of depression in adolescents using a cognitive-behavioral model. He has an M.D. from Case Western University and an honorary Sc.D. degree from Emory University.
Thomas Boat (Planning Committee Member and Workshop Presenter) is the dean emeritus of the College of Medicine at the University of Cincinnati and a professor of pediatrics in the Division of Pulmonary Medicine at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He was formerly the director of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Research Foundation and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. More recently, he has worked at the local and national level to improve child health research efforts, subspecialty training, and clinical care. He has a special interest in issues posed by children’s mental health for pediatric care, research, and training, and he is working in Cincinnati and nationally to promote children’s behavioral health. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has also served as chair of the American Board of Pediatrics and as president of both the Society for Pediatric
Research and the American Pediatric Society. He has an M.D. in pediatric pulmonology from the University of Iowa.
Alex Briscoe (Workshop Presenter) was appointed director of the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency in 2009, where he led one of the state’s largest public health systems, overseeing health and hospital systems, public health, behavioral health, and environmental health departments with an annual budget of $700 million and 6,200 full-time contract and civil service staff. Before joining the county, he was the director of the Chappell Hayes Health Center at McClymonds High School in West Oakland, a satellite outpatient center of Children’s Hospital and Research Center. He has designed and administered a number of mental health and physical health programs and services in child serving systems, including home visiting programs, programs for medically fragile children, and clinical and development programs in child welfare, juvenile justice, and early childhood settings. Briscoe is a mental health practitioner specializing in adolescent services and youth development. He has specialized in Medicaid policy and administration, emergency medical services, youth voice and crisis counseling, and safety net design and administration.
Stephen Buka (Workshop Presenter) is a professor and was the founding chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health. Buka is an epidemiologist whose work centers on the causes and prevention of neuropsychiatric disorders. He has conducted extensive research in neuropsychology and psychiatric epidemiology and has directed several major longitudinal studies examining the impact of birth complications, environmental hazards, and socioeconomic conditions on behavioral and intellectual development. He launched and is directing the New England Family Study, which is a prospective, three-generation study of over 5,000 participants from the Boston and Providence sites of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project, which combines a family design, discordant sibling sets, molecular genetics and biological assays, psychiatric, neuropsychological, and functional imaging assessments.
Nathaniel Counts (Workshop Presenter) is the senior policy director at Mental Health America, where he works on innovative federal and state policy solutions for problems in behavioral health. In particular, he focuses on issues in incentive alignment and sustainable financing in behavioral health care, as well as issues in population health. Counts serves on the boards of directors for the One Circle Foundation, CHADD (Children and Adults with ADD), and the Flawless Foundation. He received his J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was a Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law policy student fellow, and his B.A. in biology from Johns
Hopkins University. His most recent publication was “Promoting Mental Health and Well-Being in Public Health Law and Practice” in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics.
Erin Dunn (Workshop Presenter) is a social and psychiatric epidemiologist with expertise in genetics and epigenetics. Her research laboratory uses interdisciplinary approaches to better understand the social and biological factors that influence first onsets of depression among women, children, and adolescents (www.thedunnlab.com). Dunn is currently an assistant professor at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School and is affiliated with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard, and the Henry and Allison McCance Center for Brain Health at MGH. She is the director of research for the Brain Health Initiative, a study based in Florida that aims to revolutionize what we know about (and how we prevent and treat) brain health conditions across the life course (www.brainhealthinitiative.org). She has led several genetic studies that were the first of their kind, and this work was recognized by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America through the Donald F. Klein Early Career Investigator Award and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation through the Gerald R. Klerman Award, Honorable Mention. She is a 2017 recipient of a National Institute of Mental Health-funded Biobehavioral Research Award for Innovative New Scientists (BRAINS). In 2018, she was awarded a Rising Star award from One Mind.
Neal Halfon (Workshop Presenter) is the founding director of the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families, and Communities, and also directs the Child and Family Health Leadership and Training Program at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Halfon is professor of pediatrics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; health policy and management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health; and public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. For more than two decades, Halfon has been instrumental in advancing research, policy, and systems innovations focused on the healthy development of children at local, national, and international levels. The Center for Healthier Children, Families, and Communities has created a new interdisciplinary platform at UCLA to pursue transdisciplinary research, provided a mechanism to launch significant community-based research, and has spearheaded service and training initiatives.
Kimberly Hoagwood (Workshop Presenter) is the vice chair for research in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine. Her research portfolio focuses on
four areas: child, adolescent and family outcomes; parent engagement and activation; implementation science in policy contexts; and quality measurement. She also works with the Division of Child, Adolescent, and Family Services at the New York State Office of Mental Health as a research scientist. Hoagwood received her Ph.D. in school psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park. Prior to joining the faculty at NYU, Hoagwood was a professor of clinical psychology in psychiatry at Columbia University. Before that, she was the associate director for child and adolescent mental health research in the Office of the Director at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she also directed the child and adolescent services research program. She is the co-director with Mary McKay of the Community Technical Assistance Center, which serves all of the child service agencies in New York State. She is the principal investigator on several other major grants and subcontracts, all focused on improving the quality of services and outcomes for children and families.
Pilyoung Kim (Workshop Presenter) is an assistant professor in the department of psychology and the director of the Family and Child Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Denver. She received a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Cornell University and received postdoctoral training in developmental-affective social neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health. Her NIH-funded longitudinal research program focuses on investigating how poverty influences brains of two generations (new mothers and their infants). She and her team investigate the roles of prenatal and postnatal exposure to poverty and stress in (1) neural adaptation to parenthood in new mothers and (2) brain development in infants and young children. Her primary research method is pediatric neuroimaging using a functional magnetic resonance imaging, which enables strong research investigation into environmental effects on human brain development. She has over 50 publications and was awarded the Victoria S. Levin Award for Early Career Success in Young Children’s Mental Health from the Society for Research in Child Development.
Laurel Leslie (Planning Committee Member, Workshop Presenter) is an associate professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine with a primary appointment in the Department of Medicine and a secondary appointment in pediatrics. She is an active faculty member in the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences. She is also the associate director of community engagement at Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Leslie received her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She completed her residency training in primary care pediatrics and fellowship training in developmental-behavioral pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, where she also
served as the chief medical resident. Subsequently, she served as a research scientist with the Child and Adolescent Services Research Center at Rady Children’s Hospital and Health Center in San Diego. Leslie received an M.P.H. in epidemiology and biostatistics at San Diego State University. Leslie joined the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center in the fall of 2006. Leslie’s areas of inquiry include the impact of guidelines and policy initiatives on youth service use and outcomes and collaborative models of care across sectors that incorporate the child and family as active participants in care. Leslie also maintains an active interest in defining the future of pediatric practice and education, participating in the Task Force on the Future of Pediatric Education II, the Pediatric Leadership Alliance, and the American Board of Pediatrics’ current Residency Review and Redesign Project.
Benjamin F. Miller (Workshop Presenter) is the chief strategy officer for Well Being Trust, a national foundation committed to advancing the mental, social, and spiritual health of the nation. He helps oversee the foundation’s portfolio ensuring alignment across grantees, overall strategy and direction, and connection of the work to advance policy. Prior to joining Well Being Trust, Miller spent 8 years as an associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine, where he was the founding director of the Eugene S. Farley, Jr. Health Policy Center. He remains a senior advisor to the Farley Center. Miller is currently an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. He completed his predoctoral internship at the University of Colorado’s Health Sciences Center, where he trained in primary care psychology. In addition, Miller worked as a postdoctoral fellow in primary care psychology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health.
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