Who We Are
I-CEPS 2027 Invited Speakers
Dr Carolyn Webster-Stratton, is Professor Emeritus, University of Washington School of Nursing and developer of the Incredible Years® Series for Parents, Teachers and Children. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and pediatric nurse practitioner. Dr Webster-Stratton is a leading expert in training parents and teachers in child behavior management skills, as well as training clinicians to help children develop social, emotional and language skills, problem-solving skills, and school readiness. She has published books for teachers, therapists, parents and children, as well as conducted numerous randomized controlled studies evaluating the different Incredible Years programs. She has over 40 years of clinical and research experience helping families and teachers of young children with challenging behaviors, attention difficulties, and developmental delays. The Incredible Years programs have been delivered in more than 24 countries. Her work has been widely recognized through numerous prestigious honors, including awards from the American Psychological Association, National Institute of Mental Health and American Academy of Pediatrics, as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Sherbrooke, Quebec..
Dr Matthew Sanders is an an Emeritus Professor of Parenting Studies at the Parenting and Family Support Centre at The University of Queensland, Australia. As the founder of the Triple P – Positive Parenting Program, he is considered a world leader in the development, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of population-based approaches to parenting and family interventions. He has published extensively in the area of parenting, family psychology and the prevention of social, emotional and behavioural problems, and the prevention of child maltreatment. His work has been widely recognised by his peers, as reflected by a number of prestigious awards. He received an Order of Australia (2020). He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Psychological Society, the New Zealand Psychological Society, the Australian Association of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, and the Academy of Experimental Criminology. He helped establish the Parenting and Family Research Alliance (PAFRA) in 2020.
Dr Vashti Berry is a Professor of Prevention Science, working in the prevention and early intervention of children’s psychosocial health difficulties. Her work is focused on services supporting children and families, particularly in the context of challenging family contexts such as domestic violence and abuse or reduced parenting capacity. She has a commitment to research that targets health inequalities by working in partnership with the public. Professor Berry collaborates internationally on prevention and early intervention with children and families. She designs and leads studies that answer pressing questions for commissioners, clinicians and practitioners working for and with children and families, often seeking a solution to the most effective way to prevent or intervene early in difficulties with their health and development.Her research has provided evidence to influence the design and delivery of public services and policy in early years, parenting, domestic abuse support and prevention of poor mental health.
Dr Mary Dozier is Unidel Amy E. duPont Chair and Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware in the United States. She has studied the development of young children in foster care and young children living with neglecting birth parents, examining challenges in attachment and regulatory capabilities. Along with her graduate students and research team, she developed an intervention, Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), for parents of vulnerable infants. Through randomized clinical trials, ABC has been demonstrated to be effective in enhancing parental sensitivity and children’s behavioral and biological functioning. In 2016 she was named the Francis Alison Professor, the university’s highest faculty honor. In 2018 she received the International Society for Infancy Studies Translational Research Award and was the 2019 recipient of the American Psychological Association Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution in Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society.
Dr Beth Stormshak is a Knight Chair and Professor in the Counseling Psychology and Human Services department in the College of Education. Her research focuses on understanding risk factors in early and middle childhood associated with the development of problem behavior in late adolescence, including substance use and delinquency. She has served as the principal investigator on multiple grants, including RCTs that tested the efficacy and effectiveness of family-centered models of prevention to reduce risk behavior in early childhood, in school-age children, and in adolescents, with a primary focus on enhancing parenting skills. Her primary research focus includes testing the efficacy of family-centered interventions, such as the Family Check-Up, that reduce the later risk of problem behavior. She also studies the process of dissemination of evidence-based interventions into real world community settings and has developed an online version of the Family Check-Up for wide-scale dissemination.
Dr Christina Bethell has built her work around an intentional goal to catalyze health care and public health transformation at the policy, systems and practice levels. This has been driven by an unwavering focus on advancing a whole-person, whole-family and whole-community model of care that engages patients and the public, is transparent, continuously learning and collaborative. Dr Bethell has been a national leader in the development of policy, practice and research applications of population health and systems performance measurement and family and community centered improvement methods. As founding director of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI) and the National Data Resource Center for Child and Adolescent Health, supported through HRSA’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau, she initiated and led the collaborative development, validation and national, state and local implementation and IT based public reporting of child, family and community health and health systems performance and outcomes.
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Dr Jorge Cuartas is an Associate Professor of Economics and Psychology at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), where he directs the Catalyzing Action for Resilient Ecologies (CARE) Lab. He is also an Advisor at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood and a Research Affiliate with Global TIES for Children and IHDSC at New York University, where he was previously Assistant Professor. He holds a PhD in Education and Human Development from Harvard University. At the intersection between developmental psychology, economics, implementation science, and public health, his research examines violence prevention against children, parenting program evaluation, and the effects of climate change on child development, with a focus on Latin America. He co-founded Apapacho, a violence-prevention parenting program now part of Colombia's national early childhood policy. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles, including in The Lancet and Nature Human Behaviour, and has advised UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank.
Dr Helen Pearson is an award-winning science journalist, editor, author and communicator. She has been a journalist and editor for Nature, the world’s leading science journal, for over 20 years, including five years as Chief Magazine Editor. She was named European Science Journalist of the Year in 2025, and Editor of the Year at the Association of British Science Writers awards in 2022. She is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT 2026-27, and Honorary Professor of Practice at University College London, where she teaches science writing and journalism on the MSc in Science Communication. Her popular science book, The Life Project, was named best science book of the year by The Observer, was a book of the year for The Economist and was longlisted for the Orwell Prize. Her second book, Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works, published in 2026, is about the ‘evidence revolution’ – the global movement promoting the idea that scientific evidence should guide our decisions, rather than unreliable opinions or conventional wisdom.