Invited Speakers
Nicholas Allen
Smartphone mobile sensing as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool: The case of suicide prediction and prevention
Brief bio: Nick Allen is the Ann Swindells Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oregon, where he Director of Clinical Training. He is a leading researcher in the area of adolescent mental health, known especially for his work on adolescent onset depression. His work aims to understand the interactions between multiple risk factors for adolescent emergent mental health disorders, including stress, family processes, brain development, autonomic physiology, genetic risk, immunology, and sleep. More recently, his work has focused on translating risk factors identified in his prospective longitudinal studies into innovative preventative approaches to adolescent mental health. For example, he has completed randomized controlled trials of a sleep improvement interventions that aims to prevent the onset of mental disorders during adolescence, and is also exploring other innovative preventative approaches (e.g., parenting, outdoor wilderness activities), aimed at early to mid-adolescence as a key inflection point in life for health trajectories. He is the Director of the Center for Digital Mental Health (https://www.c4dmh.net/), where his work focusses on the use of mobile and wearable technology to monitor risk for poor mental health, and his group has developed software tools that combine active and passive sensing methods to provide intensive longitudinal assessment of behavior with minimal participant burden. The ultimate aim of developing these technologies is to facilitate the development of a new generation of “just-in-time” behavioral interventions for early intervention and prevention of adolescent health problems.
Wayne Goodman
Building classifiers for adaptive deep brain stimulation for OCD
Brief bio: Wayne Goodman, MD, D.C and Irene Ellwood Professor and Chair of the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine, specializes in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for intractable psychiatric illnesses. He is the principal developer of the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS), the gold standard for assessing OCD, and co-founder of the International OCD Foundation, the major advocacy group for patients with OCD. Prior to joining Baylor, he held senior administrative positions at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, NIMH and the University of Florida. He graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Electrical Engineering, received his medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine and completed his internship, residency, and research fellowship at Yale School of Medicine where he remained on faculty for 7 years. He is currently a Principal Investigator on grants from NIH’s BRAIN initiative including one on developing Adaptive DBS for OCD.
Daniel Messinger
Data Drive Development—Objective Measurement of Early Interaction
Brief bio: Dr. Messinger is an interdisciplinary developmental psychologist, and the author of over 120 scientific publications appearing in journals such as Developmental Science, PLoS ONE, and Molecular Autism. He has experience leading longitudinal research initiatives funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Institute of Education Sciences. Dr. Messinger investigates the temporal dynamics of communication to understand how infants and children’s social, emotional, and language development. He uses machine learning to paint an objective picture of children’s interaction and employs computational models to make sense of the resulting big behavioral data. Dr. Messinger works with children affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD), hearing loss, and poverty.
Beatrice Beebe
All communication modalities illuminate risk in the 4-month mother-infant origins of 12-month infant disorganized attachment
Brief bio: Beatrice Beebe Ph.D. is Clinical Professor of Psychology (in Psychiatry), College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University and New York State Psychiatric Institute. Her research investigates mother-infant face-to-face communication and infant social development: the dyadic mechanisms organizing mother-infant communication, the role of maternal and infant distress, the effects of early mother-infant communication patterns on emerging infant attachment patterns, and the long-term continuity of communication patterns from infancy to adulthood. Video and audio microanalysis, together with multi-level time-series modeling, identify different patterns of contingent relating, with direct implications for early intervention. Her most recent book is: The mother-infant interaction picture book: Origins of attachment (Beebe, Cohen & Lachman, Norton, 2016). She has a half-hour internet talk (http://www.aei.org/events/decoding-the-nonverbal-language-of-babies/). She is currently Multi-PI, with Julie Herbstman, R01ES027424-01A1, of Prenatal endocrine-disrupting chemicals and social/cognitive risk in mothers and infants: Potential biologic pathways.