Rima Afifi Soweid, Ph. D., MPH, CHES

Fellow, World Health Organization Collaborating Centre

I am currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Education of the Faculty of Health Sciences, at the American University of Beirut (www.aub.edu.lb).

I have a PhD in Health Services Research, an MPH in Health Behavior and Health Education, and a B.S. in Psychology. I have lived most of my life in Lebanon, but spend about 15 years in total in the United States. I have an interesting cultural background in that I am part Palestinian, and part American, having lived in Beirut and the US for the majority of my life.

I am committed to advancing health through engaging communities, and specifically focus my efforts on the Eastern Mediterranean region of the World.

My research interests are in community-based participatory research and in evaluation. My topical interests are in youth health/health behavior, and tobacco use.

My interest in Community-Based Participatory Research projects began during my MPH training at UNC-CH School of Public Health. I then moved on to become the SAFE KIDS coordinator for Dekalb County, Georgia which involved initiating a community-based violence prevention project. As I moved on to complete by PhD at St. Louis U SPH, the interest and opportunity to engage in community work continued. Since returning to Lebanon, I have coordinated or co-coordinated two large scale community-based research projects, the first around cardiovascular disease prevention in a neighborhood of Beirut, and the most recent a youth mental health promotion project in a Palestinian refugee camp.

I am committed to community-based participatory work because I believe it leads to lasting change by engaging community members in decisions and choices about the ways they would like to live and work. I also feel that it is a two-way learning process between “academicians” and “community members” where each equally contribute their expert knowledge. Community-based partnerships bring together the best of research and practice “evidence”. I believe in the saying: “if we want more evidence-based practice, then we need more practice-based evidence.” (http://www.lgreen.net/authors/lwgreen.htm)

The Youth Working Group at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the American University of Beirut is currently engaged in a community-based participatory research project with one of the Palestinian refugee Camps in Beirut. The project aims to improve mental well being, increase attachment to schools, and enhance civic engagement of young people (aged 11-13 years, as well as 14+). The project has been funded by the Wellcome Trust of the UK and the intervention components include activities for the youth, their parents, and their teachers. The project, frorm its inception, has been guided and planned by a community youth coalition which has included youth, off an on.

We are engaged in a partnership with the KU Work Group for Community Health and Development http://communityhealth.ku.edu , and specifically, for this project, will be using the Online Documentation System of the Community Tool Box (http://ctb.ku.edu/) to monitor activities and facilitate evaluation and sense making.

Yo Jackson, PhD., ABPP,

Fellow, World Health Organization Collaborating Centre

I am currently an Associate Professor in the Clinical Child Psychology Program, joint appointed in the Departments of Psychology and Applied Behavioral Science at the University of Kansas (http://www2.ku.edu/~clchild/faculty/jackson.shtml).

Research Interests:

My research interests are in trauma and stress in youth and the development of resilience. I am particularly interested in child maltreatment and interventions that address treatment and prevention and the mechanisms of behavior change. I am also interested in culture and how culture influences parenting practices and mental health in youth.

Why I chose to be engaged in this work/How I came to be engaged in this work:

My interest in the development of resilience came from my work as a clinical child psychologist. I noticed that when a group of children were exposed to the same trauma, often there would be a few who seemed to recover quickly and show little no negative effects. I wanted to better understand the mechanisms that were at work in the development of adaptive functioning and how we as a field might be able to develop interventions that utilized the most effective predictors of recovery.

My interest in culture stems from my own background as a bi-racial person. Growing up with two cultures in my own family, I saw how cultural practices operate to influence the mental health of children. My professional work has been primarily focused on parenting practices and parental perceptions of child-rearing and child behavior that stem from cultural beliefs.

Given that the majority of mental illnesses begin in childhood, I think understanding how children demonstrate resilience is important for the development of lifelong health. It is critical that we develop interventions that begin with a focus on translation to other cultures and adaptation to myriad of settings. If we want to bridge the gap between research and practice, it is key that we think about intervention in the broadest sense possible and find ways for communities and the greater population to be served by the products of our work.

Description of the work I am engaged in:

One of the projects I am working on is identifying how protective factors and risk operate to predict mental health in youth exposed to child maltreatment. The project aims to target children in state custody and track their well-being over the course of four years. The outcome of the project will be an empirically-derived model of the process of resilience and will help to inform the field on stress in childhood as to how protective factors operate (i.e., in what amount, under what conditions) to help children recover from major life events.

I am also working on developing a better understanding of the community of parents and how we as a field might better reach parents who have children at little or those at great risk for child psychological problems. To this end, we are working on establishing how parenting programs need to be adapted to reach the broadest audience possible so that we can scale-up interventions to a population level.

Michael C. Roberts, Ph.D., ABPP,

Fellow, World Health Organization Collaborating Centre

I am Professor and Director of the Clinical Child Psychology Program at the University of Kansas. I graduated from Purdue University in clinical psychology with a specialization in clinical child psychology and interned at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (Oklahoma Children’s Memorial Hospital). Prior to the last 17 years at the University of Kansas, I was on the faculty of the University of Alabama.

Research Interests:

A significant initiative for the next several years will be working with the World Health Organziation on the revision of the Mental and Behavioural Disorders chapter of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). This work, in particular, will help develop a taxonomy of mental and behavioral disorders for children and adolescents and definitional criteria for clinical and research purposes. My research team is reviewing and synthesizing relevant scientific literature on childhood and adolescent psychological (mental) disorders. The ICD revision will include designing, conducting, and analyzing data collected in field trials. This taxonomy of physical and mental disorders is the most widely accepted system and is used internationally to classify human health conditions in a coding system and set definitional criteria for clinical and research purposes. In addition to this work with the WHO on the ICD revision, my ongoing research activities have been focused on general issues in clinical child and pediatric psychology, psychotherapeutic outcomes, program evaluation, and professional issues, including ethics and training. Previously and with some continuing projects, this work has focused on prevention, especially injury control. More specific areas of work include:

• children's and parents' perceptions of pediatric and psychological conditions and treatments; treatment adherence issues;
• program evaluation and mental health service delivery (psychotherapeutic outcomes);
• positive psychology and children's development, especially hope and benefit finding
• prevention of injuries in children and health promotion;
• effects of traumatic effects and mitigation of problems following natural and human made disasters (stress, coping, and resilience), including interpersonal violence.

My publication list includes close to 200 journal articles, book chapters, and books revolving around the application of psychology to understanding and influencing children’s physical and mental health.

I firmly believe in the scientist-practitioner orientation to approaching development and problems of childhood. This orientation requires an empirical research perspective focusing on the real world situations of children and adolescents, including their positive development and problems affecting both psychological and physical health. This approach has guided my research and professional activities in ways that I could not have envisioned during my graduate training or early career. It has been an invigorating life of learning, discovery, and, I hope, contributions to the health and well-being of children and their families.

Description of the work I am engaged in:

I have an eclectic research team of graduate and undergraduate students with a diversity of interests. We have current projects on such phenomena as peanut allergies and family adjustment; meta-analyses of adherence to medication regimens for acute and chronic illnesses; family conflict, community violence, and adolescents’ depressive symptoms; acceptability of weight loss interventions; social support and family stress; program evaluations of family medicine and outpatient pediatric clinics; evaluations of summer camps for children with sickle cell disease and cancer and a dance camp for inner city at risk for developing psychosocial problems. The work with the WHO and the revision of the International Classification of Diseases represents an opportunity to participate in a larger domain and involve students in the scientific data underlying the diagnostic codes and implementation of the ICD in multiple settings in clinical settings, research investigations, teaching and training of professionals, and public health activities. More information on our work can be found at on the website of the Clinical Child Psychology Program: http://www2.ku.edu/~clchild/faculty/roberts.shtml