Prevention & Protection Brainstorming Workshop
Harvard Law School
Cambridge, MA
May 10-11, 2012
Sandra Alexander is a recognized national leader, strategic thinker, and innovator in child abuse prevention with over 40 year’s experience including CPS casework and supervision, developing child abuse prevention programs, training, technical assistance and consultation, and 18 years of nonprofit management experience. She has previously served as Executive Director of both Prevent Child Abuse South Carolina and Prevent Child Abuse Georgia and currently is an Expert Consultant in child maltreatment prevention in the Division of Violence Prevention at the CDC. She is a past board president of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) and former chair and current prevention advocate for the Fulton County (Atlanta) Child Fatality Review Committee. She has developed numerous prevention programs including shaken baby prevention, provided training on prevention nationally and internationally, and served as a prevention voice for local and national media. Sandra authored the chapter on “Prevention” in Child Maltreatment – A Comprehensive Photographic Reference Identifying Potential Child Abuse and “Preventing Future Deaths Through Effective Prevention Recommendations and Actions,” in Child Fatality Review. She is currently co-editing a book on Child Maltreatment Prevention.
Richard P. Barth is Dean, School of Social Work, University of Maryland. He has also served as a chaired professor at UC Berkeley and University of North Carolina. He has authored many books, chapters, and articles on children’s services practice, programs, policy, and research.
He was the 1986 winner of the Frank Breul Prize for Excellence in Scholarship from the University of Chicago, a Fulbright Scholar in 1990 and 2006, the 1998 recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Research from the National Association of Social Workers, the 2005 winner of the Flynn Prize for Research, the 2007 winner of the Peter Forsythe Award from the American Public Human Services Association, and 2010 winner of the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society for Social Work and Research.
He has served as a lecturer and consultant to numerous countries, states, and universities. He has testified before Congressional and state government sub-committees about processes and outcomes of child welfare services.
He has served on many editorial boards, on the Board of the Society for Social Work Research from 2002-2006, and on the boards of numerous child serving agencies. He sits on two NIH-funded Center grants intended to advance interdisciplinary work in child and family services research . He recently served on the steering committee of the IOM/NRC workshop on child abuse. He is a Fellow and the inaugural President and Chairman of the Board of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.
Elizabeth Bartholet is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Faculty Director of the Child Advocacy Program (CAP). She teaches civil rights and family law, specializing in child welfare, adoption and reproductive technology. Before joining the Harvard Faculty, she was engaged in civil rights and public interest work, first with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and later as founder and director of the Legal Action Center, a non-profit organization in New York City focused on criminal justice and substance abuse issues. Bartholet graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.
Professor Bartholet’s publications include: NOBODY’S CHILDREN: ABUSE AND NEGLECT, FOSTER DRIFT, AND THE ADOPTION ALTERNATIVE (Beacon Press, 1999); FAMILY BONDS: ADOPTION, INFERTILITY, AND THE NEW WORLD OF CHILD PRODUCTION (Beacon Press, 1999); International Adoption: The Human Rights Position, 1 Global Policy 91 (2010); The Racial Disproportionality Movement in Child Welfare: False Facts and Dangerous Directions, 51 Ariz. L. Rev. 871 (2009); International Adoption: The Child’s Story, 24 Ga St. U. L. Rev. 333 ( 2008); International Adoption: Thoughts on the Human Rights Issues, 13 Buff Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 151 (2007); Where Do Black Children Belong? The Politics of Race Matching in Adoption, 139 Penn L. Rev. 1163 (1991); Beyond Biology: The Politics of Adoption & Reproduction, 2 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol’y 5 (Spring 1995); and Application of Title VII to Jobs in High Places, 95 Harv. L. Rev. 945 (1982).
Professor Bartholet has won several awards for her writing and her related advocacy work in the area of adoption and child welfare. Other awards include a “Media Achievement Award” in 1994 and the Radcliffe College Humane Recognition Award in 1997.
Suzin Bartley, as Executive Director of the Children’s Trust Fund (CTF), oversees the organization’s mission to prevent child abuse by strengthening families. In this role she has established CTF as a multimillion dollar organization that funds more than 100 community-based organizations throughout the state. In this capacity she has created a statewide network of parenting education and support programs and has developed and implemented a national model universal home visiting program for young parents.
In May 2010, Ms. Bartley was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in Public Administration from Curry College. She is a member of the Boston College School of Social Work Advisory Board and serves as an adjunct faculty member there. She is also a member of the United Way of Massachusetts Bay’s Healthy Childhood Development Impact Council.
Ms. Bartley chaired the Education and Policy Committees for the Cardinal’s Commission for the Protection of Children for the Archdiocese of Boston. She served on the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Responsible Fatherhood and Family Support and was a trustee for the Boston Center for Blind Children. She has served as the Chair of the Legislative Committee of the National Alliance of Children’s Trust and Prevention Funds.
Ms. Bartley received the Heroes Among Us Award from the Boston Celtics in December 2004. Ms. Bartley also received the 2002 Outstanding Child Advocacy Award from the National Association of Counsel for Children. She was featured in the book, Leadership in Nonprofit Organizations by Barry DYM and Henry Hudson.
She is a frequent guest lecturer and has presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Child Abuse and Neglect Conference, and the National Conference of State Legislators.
Prior to CTF, Ms. Bartley worked for Judge Baker Children’s Center, Coastal Community Counseling Center, and Boston City Hospital. She was an International Fellow in Applied Developmental Science at Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development of Tufts University. She trained at the Yale Child Study Center and earned a Masters of Social Work degree from the Smith School for Social Work. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Community Services from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Fields of Expertise include: Child Abuse Prevention Sexual Abuse Prevention and Education; Parenting Newborn Home Visiting; Legislative Advocacy Parenting Education and Support.
Mary Bassett joined the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in 2009 as Director for its African Health Initiative, an effort that focuses on strengthening health systems in projects underway in Ghana, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia. In late 2011, she additionally assumed leadership for the Child Abuse Prevention Program, which for 10-years has made grants aimed at preventing child maltreatment. Previously she was a deputy commissioner at the New York City Health Department, where she oversaw programs that addressed non-communicable disease and maternal and child health as well as district public health offices based in Harlem, Central Brooklyn and the Bronx. Between 1985 and 2002 she lived in Harare, Zimbabwe where she was a member of the medical faculty at the University of Zimbabwe. She has also served for many years as an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Public Health.
Jill Duerr Berrick serves as the Zellerbach Family Foundation Chair and Professor in the School of Social Welfare and co-director of the Center for Child and Youth Policy at U.C. Berkeley. Berrick’s research focuses on the child welfare system and efforts to improve the experiences of children and families touched by foster care. She has written or co-written ten books on topics relating to family poverty, child maltreatment, and child welfare. Her interests target the intersect between poverty, early childhood development, parenting, and the service systems designed to address these issues. Her research approach typically relies upon the voices of service system consumers to identify the impacts of social problems and social service solutions on family life.
Cassie Bevan is a veteran of the U.S. House of Representatives and was the “in house expert” on children, youth, and families for over 20 years. Currently, she is an Adjunct Faculty Member at University of Pennsylvania, teaching children and families policies courses and Child Welfare Fellow at the Field Center for Children’s Policy, Practice & Research.
Sharon Boles serves as the Research and Evaluation Director of Children and Family Futures (CFF). In this role, Dr. Boles oversees numerous local, state and federally-funded projects that measure performance effectiveness and evaluate outcomes for children and families affected by substance use disorders who are at risk or involved in child welfare services. These projects include: the federally-funded Regional Partnership Grants Support Contract, the federally-funded Children Affected by Methamphetamine Support Contract, and the locally funded Sacramento Dependency Drug Court evaluation project. Dr. Boles also provides overall project management to research and evaluation projects, supervises members of the research and evaluation team, conducts evaluations, analyzes performance measurement and outcome data, provides evaluation technical assistance, and designs models for data collection. Dr. Boles is one of the few evaluators in the country who routinely conducts cross-systems analyses of an integrated data base of information from substance abuse treatment and child welfare. Dr. Boles’ research, practice and policy understanding of dependency drug courts and other programs that target improving the outcomes for children and families affected by substance use disorders has led her to author several publications and speak nationally on policy implications and research findings. She has a wealth of experience in the field of substance abuse research and program evaluation on which she routinely presents at local, state, and national conferences. She serves as a peer reviewer for scholarly journals that include: Child Abuse and Neglect; Child Maltreatment; Disease Management & Health Outcomes; Nicotine and Tobacco Research; Substance Abuse; and Journal of Drug Issues. In addition, Dr. Boles has served as a consultant to the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment in reviewing grant submissions for treatment outcomes projects and the Children’s Bureau for children and families outcomes projects. Prior to her position at CFF, Dr. Boles served as a Research Associate at UCLA’s Integrated Substance Abuse Programs and the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. Dr. Boles received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She completed a Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry where she conducted research on treatment outcomes.
Jessica Budnitz is a Lecture on Law and the founding Managing Director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School. Before working at CAP, she founded and directed Juvenile Justice Partners, a child-focused legal clinic in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is an Echoing Green Foundation Fellow, the 2003 recipient of HLS’s Gary Bellow Public Service Award, and a 2004 recipient of the YWCA of Cambridge Award for Outstanding Women. For many years, Ms. Budnitz was a Prelaw Residential Tutor in Leverett House at Harvard College. She is a 2001 graduate of Harvard Law School and a 1998 graduate of Duke University.
Zeinab Chahine is a Managing Director for Strategic Consulting and head of Casey Family Programs’ New York City Office. Ms. Chahine has spent the past twenty five years working in the field of child welfare. Prior to joining Casey Family Programs, Ms. Chahine served as the Administration for Children’s Services Executive Deputy Commissioner for Child Welfare Programs. She was responsible for the operation of all child protective, preventive, foster care and adoption services in New York City. She previously held casework, supervisory and managerial positions in child protective services. She had a significant role in the design, development and implementation of major innovative child welfare reform initiatives in New York City. Ms. Chahine is considered a national expert in child protection. She has received local and National recognition for her work. In May 2, 2007, she was featured in the New York Daily News as an Immigrant New Yorker who has made a positive difference for the City. She was awarded The National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators Peter W. Forsythe Award for Leadership in Public Child Welfare for 2009. Ms. Chahine holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College and a Master of Social Work degree from Columbia University. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at City University of New York, Hunter College School of Social Work.
Marc Cherna was appointed the Director of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS) in January 1997. He first came to Allegheny County in February 1996 as a result of a national search to take charge of the county’s child protective service agency and immediately implemented system-wide changes that have resulted in better safety and permanency outcomes for children. Marc’s innovative practice and leadership abilities have also garnered him prestigious awards by numerous human service, humanitarian, and civic organizations including the Betsey R. Rosenbaum Award for Excellence in Child Welfare Administration from the National Assn. of Public Child Welfare Administrators. He has also served as an Adjunct Faculty at University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz School.
Judge Jeri Beth Cohen is currently a circuit judge in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit Juvenile Dependency Division. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree at Boston University, her Master of Arts degree at Harvard University, and her Juris Doctorate at Georgetown Law. Judge Cohen was a trial attorney, assistant state attorney, and county judge before becoming a circuit judge twelve years ago. With 12 years of combined experience in the juvenile dependency division, Judge Cohen has taught at statewide and national conferences and judicial colleges, and published numerous articles on family drug courts and child welfare. Judge Cohen has presided over a Dependency Drug Court for the last 15 years and was instrumental in training other drug courts across the country. Her drug court was an original mentor court for The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. She received a four year National Institute of Drug and Alcohol grant along with The University of Miami School of Epidemiology to study motivational casework in family drug court. She is the chair of the Community-Based Care Alliance in Miami-Dade County and currently serves as the chair of the Statewide Dependency Court Improvement Panel which is focusing on improving court practices related to outcomes from the Child and Family Services Reviews. She also serves on the Executive Board of the South Florida Behavioral Health Network, an entity tasked with redesigning our mental health and substance abuse system in Miami-Dade County, Florida.
Susan Cole received her bachelor’s degree from Marygrove College, Detroit, Michigan, in 1968, her MSW from the School of Social Work, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI in 1983, and her Ph.D. in social welfare from the Mandel School of Applied Social Science, Case Western Reserve University in 2001. After a 25 year professional career in education and social work that included clinical social work practice, program development, evaluation, and research, Prof. Cole joined the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor in 2001 and became as associate professor with tenure in 2008. Professor Cole’s career has included development and evaluation of such programs as the Adolescent PKU Program, PKU-Clinic, the University of Michigan Medical Center, Ann Arbor, Michigan; the behavioral health program in the Human Services Department, Ministry of Health, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Majuro, Marshall Islands; the Peer Education Program, Hawai’i State Department of Health and Department of Education; and development, implementation, and evaluation of a social work and behavioral health programs for recent immigrants and homeless with severe and persistent mental illness served by the Kalihi-Palama Health Center, Honolulu, Hawai’i.
Professor Cole is recognized for her research into factors affecting attachment relationships between infants and foster caregivers and psychosocial factors affecting foster caregivers. More recently she is recognized for her work evaluating crisis nursery interventions, prison nurseries, and programs assisting mothers returning from prison.
Deborah Daro is a Senior Research Fellow at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining Chapin Hall in January 1999, Dr. Daro served as director of the National Center on Child Abuse Prevention Research, a program of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, where she contributed to the development of Healthy Families America (HFA), a strategy for developing a universal system of support for all newborns and their parents. With over 30 years of experience in evaluating child abuse treatment and prevention programs and child welfare reform efforts, she has directed some of the largest multisite program evaluations completed in the field. Most recently, Dr. Daro’s research and writing have focused on developing reform strategies that embed individualized, targeted prevention efforts within more universal efforts to alter normative standards and community context. She currently serves as co-project director for the federally funded national cross-site evaluation of the Supporting Evidence-based Home Visitation Programs to Prevent Child Maltreatment. In this capacity, she has played a lead role in crafting a system for monitoring initial and ongoing program fidelity in a consistent way across the five national home visitation models being implemented in this initiative.
For the past several years, Dr. Daro has assisted a number of state and local entities in developing more integrated systems of early intervention that build on a system of universal as well as targeted home-based interventions. Current and past clients include Children’s Services Council of Palm Beach County, FL , the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation, Thrive by Five Seattle and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Community Action Project in Tulsa, OK. Most relevant for this project is her current work with the First 5 Commission in Los Angeles County to identify a system of home based interventions and related services for implementation in 14 of the county’s highest risk communities. This process has involved the articulation of a set of best practice standards to guide all direct service investment decisions, the development of a universal assessment and referral process to reach all new parents within the target communities, and the development of appropriate data management systems to track implementation and to foster continuous program improvement.
Dr. Daro has published and lectured widely; her research is frequently cited in the rationale for child abuse prevention and treatment reforms. In June 2009, she testified before the House Ways and Means Committee in support of the President Obama’s proposal to provide home visiting services to assist new parents in caring for their infants. She has served as president of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children and as Treasurer and executive council member of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect.
Jim Dwyer has been at William & Mary since 2000. He teaches family law and youth law, and his scholarship focuses on child welfare issues. Reflecting both his legal training and his doctorate in philosophy, much of Jim’s work is highly theoretical, deconstructing prevailing assumptions about parental entitlement and developing positive accounts of children’s rights in several contexts. On a more practical level, he has also worked as an attorney for children (in upstate New York), done law reform work in Virginia, and published a detailed critique of the child protection system. Jim is currently writing a book arguing that today liberals pose the greater obstacle to race equality in America, because of their inclination, in several important contexts in which the interests of minority race parents and children diverge, to adopt positions primarily protective of the parents.
John Fluke has more than 32 years of experience in social service delivery system research in the area of Child Welfare and Mental Health Services for children. In November 2007 he became the director of the Child Protection Research Center at the American Humane Association. As of January 2012 he became the vice president of the Children’s Innovation Institute and is a Scholar in Residence at the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver. He is internationally recognized as a researcher specializing in assessing and analyzing decision making in human services delivery systems. He is also known for his innovative and informative evaluation work in the areas of child welfare administrative data analysis, workload and costing, and performance and outcome measurement for children and family services.
As a research manager he has experience in directing research and evaluation projects focused on maltreatment surveillance data, children’s mental health, child protective service risk and safety assessment, expedited permanency, guardianship, family group decision making, trauma services, adoption, and screening. He is also active in the area of national child maltreatment data collection systems and analysis and has worked with data collection programs in Canada, Saudi Arabia, the US, and for UNICEF. He has been active in research and evaluation at all levels of government, in the private not-for-profit sector, and with national foundations and associations that includes work both in the U.S. and internationally.
The author or co-author of numerous scholarly publications, Dr. Fluke has presented papers at both national and international meetings and conferences. He is co-chair of the Working Group on Child Maltreatment Data Collection for ISPCAN. He holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Decision Science from Union Institute and Universities, an MA in Anthropology from the Pennsylvania State University, and a BA in Mathematical Anthropology from the University of Northern Colorado.
Hon. Gail Garinger (ret.) serves as The Child Advocate for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, having been appointed by Governor Deval Patrick in April 2008. Prior to her appointment, she served as a juvenile court judge for 13 years and from 2001-2008 was the First Justice of the Middlesex County Division of the Juvenile Court Department. Judge Garinger previously was in private practice, specializing in child welfare and health law, after acting as general counsel at Children’s Hospital Boston and directing an NIMH-funded child abuse and neglect research project at the Judge Baker Guidance Center. She has served on several Supreme Judicial Court committees, including the Commission on Juvenile Justice, the Judiciary and the Media Committee, and the judicial evaluation committee. She has written on a variety of children’s health and welfare as well as juvenile justice topics, and is a frequent panelist, speaker and guest lecturer. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Indiana University.
Rob Geen is the Director or Policy, Research, and Communications within the Center for Effective Family Services and Systems at the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF). Prior to coming to AECF, Rob was the Vice President for Public Policy and Director of the Child Welfare Program at Child Trends, a non-partisan policy research organization in Washington D.C. For two years, Rob was also a visiting fellow with the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means. Earlier in his career, Rob was director of the Child Welfare Research Program at the Urban Institute and an evaluator for the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Fostering Media Connections was founded and is led by journalist Daniel Heimpel. Heimpel’s first brush with the foster care system was in 2006, while a volunteer coach for an unlikely lacrosse team in South Central Los Angeles. One of his favorite players was a 16-year-old named Chris who had some anger issues. Heimpel asked Chris what his parents had to say about his misdirected rage, and he replied: “I don’t have any parents, I live in a group home.” Soon after, Heimpel visited Chris’ group home deep in South Central L.A. and wrote a story about the realities of being a foster kid in urban Los Angeles for the LA Weekly. Before long Heimpel was mentoring Chris and another young man in the system, all the while covering foster care with increasing intensity. Heimpel has written and produced stories about foster care for the Los Angeles Daily News, Newsweek, the Seattle Times, the Huffington Post, Current TV and theSan Jose Mercury News among many others.
This coverage has garnered Heimpel journalism awards from the Children’s Advocacy Institute, The Los Angeles Press Club and the Child Welfare League of America among others. As FMC’s project director and founder, Heimpel is working to recruit an “army of journalists” who he hopes will cover foster care with the same intensity as he does.
M. Rebecca Kilburn (Ph.D., Economics, University of Chicago) is a Senior Economist at RAND. During her 15 years at the RAND Corporation, much of Dr. Kilburn’s research has focused on examining the effects of programs and policies for vulnerable children and conducting cost and outcome analysis for children’s programs. In 2009, she co-led a project that provided research information that informed the strategic review for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Child Abuse Prevention Program. This included fielding and analyzing a survey of professionals in the child abuse and neglect prevention field (Shaw and Kilburn, 2009), and editing a volume of papers regarding current directions for the child maltreatment field (Shaw and Kilburn, 2008). Dr. Kilburn is the Director of the Promising Practices Network (PPN) on Children, Families and Communities (www.promisingpractices.net), a website project that identifies, screens, and presents information about effective interventions for children and families. She has overseen hundreds of systematic reviews of children’s programs, many of which related to child maltreatment, family strengthening, and other topics related to vulnerable children and families. In 2006, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government named PPN a finalist in its Innovations in American Government Awards. Another area of her research has focused on cost and outcome analysis for children’s programs. Dr. Kilburn co-authored Investing in Our Children, RAND’s path-breaking 1998 report that conducted some of the original cost-benefit analysis of early childhood interventions. Subsequent publications synthesized evaluations of early childhood interventions to generate estimates of pooled effect sizes, identify features of effective programs, and estimate costs and government savings produced by these interventions (Karoly, Kilburn et al., 2001, Kilburn and Karoly, 2008, Karoly, Kilburn, and Cannon, 2005). Dr. Kilburn is currently conducting three research projects in the area of home visiting. One is a randomized trial evaluation of the First Born® Program, a home visiting model that combines nurses and other trained staff to enhance the health and learning outcomes of children and their parents. She is also helping the Taos Pueblo establish an evaluation and child and maternal health surveillance program as part of their Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) grant. The third project is a MIECHV Development Grant to the State of New Mexico that implements and evaluates the use of the Getting to Outcomes™ framework as a way to enhance the capacity of under-served communities to deliver home visiting services. Another ongoing study, which is being funded by NIH, examines the relationship between state laws requiring booster seat use for children over age 4 and rates of auto injuries and fatalities for children in the state. Dr. Kilburn recently published results from a process and implementation evaluation of an early childhood systems change in another state. This ongoing study evaluates the State of Hawaii’s P-3 initiative, which integrates early learning programs into the education system. Dr. Kilburn also has experience serving on policy advisory boards to help communities implement effective services and programs for vulnerable families, including appointments to the Los Angeles County Children’s Planning Council and the New Mexico Home Visiting Work Group. She is currently a Professor in the Pardee RAND Graduate School and has also taught economics at the University of Chicago and statistics at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Elected to the bench in 1988, Judge Cindy S. Lederman has served in the Miami-Dade Juvenile Court since 1994, including a decade as the Court’s Presiding Judge.
Judge Lederman’s interest in bringing science and research into the courtroom results from her 10 year involvement with the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences. Judge Lederman was a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Family Violence Interventions and Panel on Juvenile Crime, Treatment and Control and has served from 1996 to 2004 on the Board of Children, Youth and Families of the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. She served as a President of the National Association of Women Judges, faculty member of the National Judicial College, member of the ABA House of Delegates and member of the Board of Trustees of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. In 2008 Judge Lederman presented at an invited address, How Judges Use Neuroscience to Break the Cycle of Maltreatment, The Science of Learning, Behavior, and Health: Closing the Gap between What We Know and What We Do, a Colloquium Series presented by The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.
In March 2011, Judge Lederman presented an invited address entitled “Science Informed Jurisprudence” at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) in Montreal. Additionally, in October 2011, Harvard Law School invited Judge Lederman to speak at the Child Advocacy Program (CAP), Art of Social Change: Child Welfare, Education, and Juvenile Justice, “Problem Solving Courts for Children & Families.”
Judge Lederman’s recent book, entitled “Child-Centered Practices for the Courtroom and Community: A Guide to Working Effectively with Young Children in the Child Welfare System” written with Lynne Katz Ed.D and Joy Osofsky Ph.D. is available from Brookes Publishing Co. Also in 2011, Judge Lederman was appointed as Vice Chair of the Early Learning Coalition of Miami-Dade County.
Judge Lederman graduated with high honors from the University of Florida in 1976 and Departmental Honors in Political Science, and received a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Miami Law School in 1979. She is licensed to practice law in the states of Florida and New York.
John B. Mattingly is currently serving as a Senior Fellow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. From 2004 to 2011 John was the Commissioner of the New York City Administration for Children Services, responsible for child welfare, child care, Head Start, and juvenile justice. At an earlier stint at the Casey Foundation he headed up the Foundation’s first child welfare initiative, Family to Family, an effort to assist public child welfare systems to improve the outcomes they were achieving for families and children. Prior to that, he served as Executive Director of Lucas County Children’s Services, the public child welfare agency serving Northwest Ohio. John has a MSW from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in Community Systems from the Pennsylvania State University.
Dr. Jeanne Miranda is a health services researcher in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. Her research has focused on getting evidence-based mental health care to low-income and minority individuals. She has developed an intervention for families adopting older children from foster care. She was the Senior Scientific Editor of the Surgeon General’s Report on minority mental health. She became a member of the Institute of Medicine in 2005.
Robert Murphy, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Maternal & Child Health at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. Since 2004, he has directed the Center for Child & Family Health (CCFH), a consortium of Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina Central University dedicated to research, training, and intervention related to the prevention and amelioration of child traumatic stress. Murphy has a background in services evaluation and intervention for traumatized youth, as well as prevention efforts to reduce the likelihood of maltreatment and physical and psychological trauma. He leads a community treatment and services site of the National (U.S.) Child Traumatic Stress Network focused on improving access to evidence based mental health care for youth in the child welfare system, as well as the implementation arm of a multi-year statewide (NC) study of a universal intervention designed to prevent abusive head trauma. He is co-principle investigator for Durham Family Initiative, a ten-year initiative designed to reduce community maltreatment by a magnitude of 50% through a brief, universal, nurse home visiting program. Through the Duke Evidence-based Practice Implementation Center (EPIC), Murphy focuses on implementation and dissemination of evidence based mental health practices via methods derived from implementation science. Other efforts are focused on child adjustment following parental combat deployment, trauma informed child welfare systems, and orphans and vulnerable children in low- and middle-income countries. Prior to 2004, Murphy served as research director for the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence at the Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center.
Barbara Needell, M.S.W., Ph.D. is a Research Specialist at the Center for Social Services Research at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the recipient of the 2008 Peter Forsythe Award for Leadership in Public Child Welfare from the American Public Human Services Association. As Principal Investigator of the California Child Welfare Performance Indicators Project (funded by the California Department of Social Services and the Stuart Foundation), she has worked extensively with statewide and county specific administrative data. Barbara and her team at UCB collaborate with state and county colleagues to produce and publicly disseminate
(http://cssr.berkeley.edu/ucb_childwelfare) the data used to support the California Child Welfare Outcomes and Accountability System. She is a member of California’s Child Welfare Council, which was created as part of the Child Welfare Leadership and Performance Accountability Act of 2006, and chairs the Data Linkage and Information Sharing Committee. CSSR has joined with Casey Family Programs to provide technical assistance nationally with the Casey-Berkeley Data Advocacy Project. Barbara graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Mills College, with a B.A. with Honors in Psychology. She received her M.S.W. and Ph.D. with Distinction from the School of Social Welfare at Berkeley. She is the mother of 2 fine young men.
Emily Putnam-Hornstein, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work. She also maintains a research appointment at the Center for Social Services Research at the University of California at Berkeley. With an interest in child maltreatment, public child welfare systems, and extensive experience in administrative data analysis, Putnam-Hornstein’s current research focuses on the application of epidemiological methods to improve the surveillance of non-fatal and fatal child abuse and neglect. Putnam-Hornstein’s dissertation, funded by the HF Guggenheim Foundation, involved the linkage of 4.3 million birth records to more than 500,000 child protective service records and 25,000 death records from California. Analysis of this repository has generated knowledge as to where scarce child welfare resources may be most effectively targeted and advances an understanding of maltreated children within a broader, population-level context. Next steps involve expanding this repository to include statewide emergency department and hospitalization data, while generating further linkages to examine intergenerational child maltreatment dynamics. Emily graduated from Yale University with a BA in Psychology, received her MSW from Columbia University, and earned her PhD in Social Welfare from the University of California at Berkeley.
Phillip Redmond joined the The Duke Endowment in 2000 as assistant director of the Child Care Division and was promoted to associate director in 2006.
While at the Endowment, Mr. Redmond has directed several projects on a variety of topics including, among others, wellness, domestic violence, building the evaluation capacity of non-profits, learning collaboratives, dissemination of evidence-based models and education.
Mr. Redmond previously was the executive director of The Children’s Law Center in Charlotte, North Carolina and formerly was in private practice in North Carolina.
Mr. Redmond’s education includes a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1986 and Juris Doctor degree from Campbell University School of Law, Buies Creek, North Carolina, 1989.
Mr. Redmond sits on the board of directors for the Council on Accreditation and the North Carolina Network of Grantmakers.
Robert Sege, M.D., Ph.D. is a practicing pediatrician, a Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University, and a member of American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect. He led the development of Connected Kids: Safe, Strong Secure program for the American Academy of Pediatrics (www.aap.org/connectedkids). His research has centered on the role of the healthcare system in child abuse prevention and diagnosis. He is a graduate of Yale College (1980), MIT (PhD, 1986) and Harvard Medical School (1988). He was the recipient of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2008 Fellow Achievement Award for his work on youth violence prevention, and is listed as one of the Best Doctors in America®.
Cynthia D. Stringfellow oversees the Educare Learning Network’s approach to Educare implementation and learning. The Educare Learning Network represents a web of research-based early childhood programs that aim to prevent the achievement gap for at-risk children ages birth to five; this is achieved through the implementation of high quality standards and use of best practices in each Educare school, public-private partnerships, and data-driven practice, all of which serves as a platform for policy change. Ms. Stringfellow designs, directs, and ensures the effective delivery of implementation assistance and consultation for Educare schools. She also oversees the institutionalization of a comprehensive learning and development system for the expanding Educare Learning Network, which is currently comprised of 13 operating schools, 4 schools under construction, and 3 additional schools under development. Ms. Stringfellow has devoted the last 20 years of her career to systems building, and program and training development and delivery for the early childhood field. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Community and Health Education from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, followed by her Master of Science degree in Counseling and Health Education from the University of North Texas. Prior to coming to the Educare Learning Network, Ms. Stringfellow served as the Director of the Midwest Learning Center for Family Support at Family Focus, Inc., a training and technical assistance center for family support, early childhood, and other human service agencies in Illinois and nationally. Previously, Ms. Stringfellow was the National Director of Training and Technical Assistance for Healthy Families America at Prevent Child Abuse America.
Kathleen Strottman comes to her role as the Executive Director of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI) after serving for nearly eight years as a trusted advisor to Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and then as an associate at Patton Boggs, LLC. As the Senator’s Legislative Director, Kathleen worked to pass legislation such as the No Child Left Behind Act, The Medicare Modernization Act, The Inter-Country Adoption Act, The Child Citizenship Act of 2000, The Adoption Tax Credit and the Family Court Act. Throughout her career, Kathleen has worked to increase the opportunity for positive dialogue and the exchange of best practices between the United States and countries such as China, Romania, Russia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Ethiopia and India. Kathleen regularly presents at national and international child welfare conferences and has appeared on CNN, FOX News, CBS, NBC, C-SPAN, PBS and numerous other media outlets. She is also a regular contributor to Adoption Today magazine. In 2010, Kathleen spearheaded The Way Forward Project, a project to stimulate dialogue among child welfare experts, government leaders, and investors on the need for family-based care, chairing the project’s Working Group on Legal, Government and Social Infrastructure. Kathleen attended Whittier Law School’s Center for Children’s Rights where she graduated with honors and received a state certified specialty in juvenile advocacy. A member of the Whittier Law Review, Kathleen published an article entitled “Creating a Downward Spiral: Transfer Statutes as Answers to Juvenile Delinquency.” Kathleen received her bachelor’s degree in political science from the College of the Holy Cross and went on to serve as a Jesuit Volunteer. She and her husband, Matt, are the proud parents of three children, Grace, Noah and Liam.
Less than a week after Massachusetts was awarded up to $50 million in Race to the Top funding for early childhood education, Thrive in 5 has selected Jane E. Tewksbury as its new Executive Director. As of February 6, 2012, Tewksbury will assume her post as head of Boston’s citywide movement to ensure that all children entering kindergarten have the resources and support they need for success in school and beyond. Tewksbury has served as Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services since 2005. Appointed by Governor Mitt Romney in 2005, Tewksbury served as the Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services where she was known for promoting positive youth development as a means to improve outcomes for juvenile offenders. In addition to serving as an Assistant Attorney General and an Assistant District Attorney during her legal career, Tewksbury completed a mid-career Children and Family Fellowship at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, where she participated in state-level human services systems reform in Arkansas and Maryland. Tewksbury is on the board of the Massachusetts Children’s Trust Fund and the YWCA. She earned her law degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School and her undergraduate degree from Harvard/Radcliffe College.
Mary Welstead is a family law professor from the UK where she has taught in a number of UK and overseas universities including Cambridge, Warwick, Buckingham and McGill. Her current positions are Visiting Professor University of Buckingham UK and a Fellow at the Child Advocacy Program Harvard Law School. As a CAP Fellow, Professor Welstead is responsible for the coordination of Graduate Visitors to CAP and for the Graduate Workshop program.
Her research interests in family law are wide ranging and include: international surrogacy, medical consent for children, forced marriage and other abusive issues specifically related to cultural values of immigrants, children of same-sex parents and their rights on relationship breakdown, child protection, international child relocation, fathers’ rights, families in a multi-cultural society, domestic violence, and the rights of members of informal families.
In 2002 she was asked to help set up a new post-conflict university in Sarajevo. She continues to be involved in this project which is now in its 8th year.
Fred H. Wulczyn is a Senior Research Fellow at Chapin Hall. He is the 2005 recipient of the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators’ (NAPCWA) Peter Forsythe Award for leadership in public child welfare. In 2011, he was honored with the Flynn Prize, an award given to a researcher whose work has had a demonstrable impact on vulnerable populations. Among his responsibilities at Chapin Hall, Dr. Wulczyn is director of the Center for State Foster Care and Adoption Data, a collaboration of Chapin Hall, the American Public Human Services Association, and other research partners. Dr. Wulczyn has designed two major social experiments: the Child Assistance Program and the HomeRebuilders project. The Child Assistance Program was awarded the Innovations in Government Award from Harvard University and the Ford Foundation. He developed the nation’s first proposal to change the federal law limiting the ability of states to design innovative child welfare programs, which then led to the development of the Title IV-E waiver programs used by states to undertake system reform in child welfare programs. Dr. Wulczyn earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.