Invited Speakers

Michael Hogan brings over 35 years of experience dedicated to improving the lives of children, young people, and families across Australia. With a strong background in both government and community sectors, Michael has led transformative work in child safety, youth development, and family services. As the former Director-General of the Queensland Department of Child Safety, Youth and Women, and the Department of Communities, Child Safety and Disability Services, Michael has been at the forefront of major policy and service reforms supporting families across the state. His leadership has helped shape more responsive systems for children and families facing vulnerability, ensuring their voices are heard and needs are met. Michael currently leads the Thriving Queensland Kids Partnership, a cross-sector initiative aimed at improving wellbeing and developmental outcomes for every child. He also plays an active role in national early childhood efforts as a member of the Leading for Every Child Steering Committee, the Centre for Policy Development’s Early Childhood Development Council, and the Australian Early Years Catalyst group.

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.

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.

Georgia Mjartan is president and CEO of Central Carolina Community Foundation. Her experience as a leader in the nonprofit, philanthropic, and public sectors informs her vision for growth and innovation at the community foundation. Georgia has been recognized as a Southerner of the Year by Southern Living Magazine and was awarded the prestigious Aspen Institute Ascend Fellowship. Ms. Mjartan serves on the national board of Parents as Teachers, the Community Investment Council for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, and the Post and Courier Education Lab Advisory Council. Mjartan’s work has been featured on national news programs, including NBC News, USA Today, and PBS. In Arkansas, she was named Nonprofit Executive of the Year and an Arkansan of the Year. In South Carolina, she was recognized as Advocate of the Year, a Woman of Distinction, a member of the Columbia Power List, and honored with a Resolution by the SC House of Representatives. Previously, Mjartan led a state agency, South Carolina First Steps, which expanded PreK statewide, more than doubling the reach of programs to directly serve over 60,000 young children annually and creating a first-in-the-nation tech innovation that transformed the way citizens apply for public early childhood programs. Mjartan began her career working on rural development projects for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the US Administration for Children and Families. After several years as a strategy and communications consultant, she led the turnaround of a large-scale, anti-poverty nonprofit called Our House, dedicated to moving families out of homelessness. She created an employment pipeline and job training programs, developed the state’s first after-school and summer program for homeless youth, and built a 20,000-square-foot center for homeless infants, toddlers, and school-aged children. Over over two decades, Georgia has served on numerous boards including as a founding member of City Year Little Rock and Harmony Health Clinic. She has also been appointed to public boards including the Columbia Housing Authority, SC Joint Citizens and Legislative Committee on Children, SC Coordinating Council for Workforce Development, and Arkansas Housing Trust Fund. Georgia earned a master’s degree in Public Affairs and Political Communications from the University of Ulster (UK) as a George Mitchell Scholar and bachelor’s degrees in English and Political Science from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock as a Donaghey Scholar. She is a graduate of Harvard University’s Senior Executives in State and Local Government program and is a Riley Diversity Leaders Initiative Fellow. Georgia is married to Dominik Mjartan, a bank CEO who has led multiple community banks. Their parenting journey has included foster care, adoption, and birth. They have three children.

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. 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.

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.

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.

Dr. Jumana Odeh's biography can be summarized in two words: Experience and empathy. A passionate pediatrician and public health expert, her dedication to public service over the decades has seen her at the helm of many programs and centers that provide assistance to those who need it most in both Palestinian society and beyond. Odeh’s lifetime efforts that have culminated in the establishment of the Palestinian Happy Child Centre for children with disabilities. Currently, Dr. Odeh is also a fellow, Disability Rights Program, Harvard University. With over 35 years of extensive experience in child’s health, public health and disability, Dr. Odeh's expertise has served her well in her position as a senior health consultant with various national and international organizations and universities. In recognition of her years of expertise, Dr. Odeh is the winner of several awards, such as: the “2008 Nobel Prize for Children""; and the 2015 TAKREEM Award.

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. 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 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.

Max Crowley is the director of the Prevention Research Center and a prevention scientist investigating how to optimize investments in healthy development and well-being. This work sits at the intersection of social policy, prevention science and public finance. His program of research is motivated by a desire to increase the use of cost-effective, evidence-based preventive strategies to improve the lives of children and families. To accomplish this, his work aims to: strengthen methods for benefit-cost analyses of preventive interventions; optimize prevention strategies’ impact; and develop best practices for how to translate these investments into evidence-based policy. In this manner, he seeks to not only understand the costs and benefits of prevention, but aims to develop better interventions and encourage them to be disseminated widely.

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.

W. Kim Halford, PhD, is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He was previously Professor of Clinical Psychology at Griffith University (1995–2008) and Director of Psychology at the Royal Brisbane Hospital (1991–1995). Dr. Halford has published four books and over 130 articles on couple therapy and couple relationship education. He works with couples adjusting to major life stresses and changes, including developing committed relationships, cancer diagnosis in a partner, becoming a parent, and forming a stepfamily. Dr. Halford leads the international team that developed the Couple CARE relationship education programs, is active in work with couples, and has provided training in work with couples to approximately 20,000 professionals in more than a dozen countries.