Who We Are
I-CEPS 2027 Invited Speakers
Dr Carolyn Webster-Stratton, Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, is the founder of the Incredible Years® Series for Parents, Children, and Teachers. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and nurse practitioner. During her time at University of Washington, Dr Webster-Stratton was Director of the UW Parenting Clinic. Forty-three years ago she began developing and researching the Incredible Years programs. She has conducted numerous randomized control group studies to evaluate the effectiveness of intervention programs for promoting social and emotional competence, school readiness skills and preventing conduct problems in high risk populations. She has also evaluated teacher, parent and child treatment programs for children diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder and ADHD. The Incredible Years programs have been delivered in more than 24 countries.
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 Angela Narayan is an Associate Professor in the Clinical Child Psychology PhD program at the University of Denver. She completed her doctoral training at the University of Minnesota and her postdoctoral training at the Child Trauma Research Program within the Department of Psychiatry at UCSF. Focused on developmental psychopathology, childhood trauma, perinatal and infant mental health, and resilience, her research program investigates how early adversities (e.g., maltreatment, violence exposure, poverty and homelessness, parental psychopathology, war and disaster) in parents' histories and their children's family environments affect psychological health and wellbeing. One of her current research directions focuses on understanding how the prenatal period is a key turning point to buffer the intergenerational transmission of risk in pregnant women and fathers-to-be with histories of childhood trauma and promote resilience in parents and infants. Dr Narayan is also a licensed clinical psychologist and a clinical supervisor in the Child and Family Clinic.