Invited Speakers

Dr. Patty Leijten works as an Associate Professor at the Research Institute of Child Development and Education of the University of Amsterdam. She studies how we can effectively support parents to enhance children’s mental health and well-being. Dr. Leijten received her PhD in developmental psychology from Utrecht University and worked as a postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford. Dr. Leijten collaborates across disciplines (e.g., psychology, psychiatry, and social work) and leads the European Parenting Program Research Consortium. Her projects are supported by grants from the Fulbright Organisation, UBS Optimus, Dutch Research Council, and the Netherlands Organisation of Health Research and Development. Dr. Leijten supervises postdoctoral researchers and PhD students on a wide range of parenting research projects. Transversal themes in her work are strengthening the capacity of young scholars and international collaboration.

Dr. Tony Biglan is a Senior Scientist at ORI and President of Values to Action. He has been researching the development and prevention of child and adolescent problem behavior for the past 40 years. He has conducted numerous experimental evaluations of interventions to prevent tobacco use, high-risk sexual behavior, antisocial behavior, and reading failure through interventions in families, schools, and communities. His book, The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World, won an award from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis. Based on the accumulated knowledge about what humans need to thrive, Dr. Biglan created Values to Action, a nonprofit organization that helps communities come together around a shared vision and create “Action Circles” to implement evidence-based solutions to their most pressing problems.

Professor Catherine Chamberlain is a Palawa Trawlwoolway woman (Tasmania), Head of the Indigenous Health Equity Unit at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne. A Registered Midwife and Public Health researcher, her research aims to identify perinatal opportunities to improve health equity across the lifecourse. She is inaugural Editor-In-Chief of First Nations Health and Wellbeing Lowitja Journal, inaugural Chief Midwifery Officer for the College of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nursing and Midwifery, and Principal Investigator for three large multi-disciplinary projects which aim to address intergenerational trauma impacting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in the perinatal period – Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future, Replanting the Birthing Trees, and Relighting the Firesticks.

Professor Alina Morawska is Director of the Parenting and Family Support Centre, The University of Queensland. She is passionate about creating a world where children develop the skills, competencies and confidence to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing world. Her research focuses on the central role of parents in influencing all aspects of children’s development, and parenting interventions as a way of understanding healthy development, a means for promoting positive family relationships, and a tool for the prevention and early intervention in lifelong health and wellbeing. She has published extensively in the field of parenting and family intervention and has received numerous grants to support her research. She is recognised as Australia’s top scholar in family studies.

Isabelle Roskam is a Full Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Louvain, Belgium. Her research focuses on child developmental psycho(patho)logy, parenting, and parental burnout. Before specializing in parental burnout, she led the H2M Children research program on the development and care of so-called ""difficult"" children. She also worked for ten years as a clinician in the pediatric neurology unit at the Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc in Brussels. In 2015, she joined forces with Prof. Moïra Mikolajczak to launch a large-scale research program on the nature, causes, consequences, and treatment of parental burnout. Together, they co-founded and co-lead the International Investigation of Parental Burnout (IIPB), a consortium of over 100 scholars from more than 50 countries. Professor Roskam has published over 145 peer-reviewed articles, 16 books, and 36 book chapters. She also co-directs the Training Institute for Psychology & Health and the Parental Burnout Research Lab, key reference centers in the field.

Marlene Moretti (moretti@sfu.ca), Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Canada Research Chair Tier 1 and licensed clinical psychologist, is the developer of the Connect Program, a manualized, 10-session attachment-based and trauma-informed intervention designed for parents and other caregivers of adolescents with serious behavioural and mental health problems. Over 25 years, this work has entailed close collaborations within culturally, politically and economically diverse communities, and international scientific, community and government partnerships, to promote the awareness, development and implementation of evidence-based interventions specifically tailored to parents of teens. Supported by national and international RCTs and broad implementation trials, and translated in nine languages, Connect is recognized as a Level 1 (recommended) intervention by the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare. Connect has proven to be flexible to gender, culture, and economic diversities while retaining flexibility and positive program outcomes for youth, adoptive and birth parents, and kinship and foster carers.

Dr Fatumo Osman is an associate professor and senior lecturer at Dalarna University in Sweden. She is also the deputy head of the School of Health and Welfare. Dr Osman obtained her PhD in Medical Science at Karolinska Institutet in 2017 with a dissertation evaluating culturally tailored parenting support programme for Somali-born parents living in Sweden. Her research interests are parenting support programmes tailored and delivered to immigrant and refugee parents, refugee children and young people's acculturation and mental health, and community-based intervention. In her research, Dr. Osman places great emphasis on engaging directly with the people being studied—not just researching about them, but collaborating with them. In 2018, Save the Children in Region Vastmanland in Sweden awarded Dr Osman for Children's Rights.

Dr Annette Bauer is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow in the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research is driven by a desire to develop and apply methodologies that can produce evidence and knowledge useful to those making or informing decisions about how resources are spent to improve population wellbeing. This includes participatory, realist and mixed method approaches to economic evaluation. She has been working as an advisor to the government, and government and non-government bodies, large research programmes, and provides advice a Trustee to charities such as Action on Postpartum Psychosis and Global Alliance for Maternal Mental Health. Her research on cost of perinatal mental health problems had major impact on policy in the UK and was part of the LSE Research Excellence Framework case impact study. Annette has led and contributed to over 50 economic evaluations and analyses of complex, prevention-focused mental health and social care programmes in the UK and Europe and globally. She has successfully gained grant funding from many national and international funding bodies. Annette has published her work in over 60 peer-reviewed articles, including in high impact academic journals, such as Lancet Psychiatry, Journal of Affective Disorder and Psychological Medicine, and presents at national and international conferences and events.

Dr. Philip Fisher is the Diana Chen Professor of Early Childhood Learning in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, where he serves as founding Director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. He is also a Courtesy Professor of Pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine. His research, which has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies since 1999, focuses on (1) developmental neuroscience of early life adversity, (2) supporting community-based early childhood systems to insure that all children thrive from the start, and on (3) developing tools and identifying pathways to accelerate the pace of early childhood research. He is particularly interested in prevention and programs for improving children's functioning in areas such as relationships with caregivers and peers, social-emotional development, and academic achievement. He is the developer of a number of widely implemented evidence-based interventions for supporting healthy child development in the context of social and economic adversity, including Treatment Foster Care Oregon for Preschoolers (TFCO-P), Kids in Transition to School (KITS), and Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND). Dr. Fisher is also currently the lead investigator in the ongoing RAPID-EC project, a national survey on the well-being of households with young children. He has published over 200 scientific papers in peer reviewed journals. He is the recipient of the 2012 Society for Prevention Research Translational Science Award, and a 2019 Fellow of the American Psychological Society.

Suzanne Kerns is a clinical-community psychologist, Professor at the University of Colorado-Anschutz and Director of Transformative Research at the Kempe Center. Her focus is on enhancing the wellbeing of children and families through ensuring access to proven-effective treatment approaches using implementation science. She is the PI for the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse, Network Partner Director for the Rocky Mountain Multisystemic Therapy Network, and is the immediate past-President of the Society for Implementation Research and Collaboration. She previously was PI for an ACYF-CB grant in Washington State called “Creating Mental Health Connections for Children and Youth in Foster Care” and was key personnel on the University of Maryland’s ACF-funded National Center for EBPs in Child Welfare.