Events
The RPCA is currently planning for upcoming Fall Events!
Seminar
"Implementation Science & Evidence Based Treatments (EBT) for Youth"
Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. EST
Speaker Bio
Shannon Dorsey, Ph.D., is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington and Adjunct Professor in Global Health and Psychiatry. Her research focuses on treatment effectiveness and implementation science, specifically for children and adolescents receiving care in low and under-resourced contexts and settings. These include publicly-funded mental health in Washington State and mostly rural areas in low and middle-income countries. She has focused on how to address the mental health treatment gap by training and supporting lay counselors to deliver mental health care. She has also focused on supervision as an implementation strategy to support successful implementation of mental health treatments. All of her work includes strong partnerships and collaborations with communities and practice partners. One current NIMH-funded study examines implementation policies and practices associated with successful implementation of a group intervention in the health and education sectors in western Kenya. She also co-directs an NIMH-funded Center, IMPACT, focused on optimizing mental health care for children and adolescents in under-resourced settings
Seminar
"Implementation and Sustainability of Suicide Prevention Programs in American Indian Communities."
Tuesday, December 14, 2021 at 9:00 a.m. EST
Dr. Emily Haroz. Dr. Haroz is an Associate Scientist in the Department of International Health, Divisionof Social and Behavioral Interventions, and the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of PublicHealth. Dr. Haroz's research focuses on mental health services for low-resource and underserved populations. Her training is in psychiatric epidemiology, including a background in advanced methodological approaches and study design. Dr. Haroz's current work focuses on suicide prevention by leveraging artificial intelligence and implementation science to better servecommunities that face significant related disparities.
Seminar
"Human-centered Design: The What, The Why, The How"
Monday, November 16, 2020 at 10:00 a.m. EST
The term 'Design' conjures many images and interpretations in our minds. The matter gets further complicated when terms phrases like human-centered design, inclusive design, design thinking, co-creative design, systems design get thrown around. This participatory session of GRIT will focus on expanding on 'The Whats, The Whys and The Hows' related to human-centered design in our context.
Speaker Bio
Sunand Bhattacharya is a learning architect and an industrial designer who has been spearheading the design and development of BC’s first human-centered engineering program. He is also helping build a culture of collaborative innovation across BC using design-driven methodologies to address real-world challenges.
Before returning to academia, Sunand was the Global Learning Strategist for Autodesk, leading its Learning Futures team. In this role, he was responsible for the strategy, management and evangelization of Autodesk’s future influence advocacy in design related STEAM and engineering education. Prior to Autodesk, Sunand was the principal and co-founding partner of Arjuna Learning Designs LLC., a firm specializing in the creation of interactive learning objects to enhance quality of teaching and learning for leading publishing houses. He was a tenured professor of industrial design at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Sunand is a recipient of the ‘Innovative Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Technology’ award from The International Conference on College Teaching and Learning.
He holds advisory positions at US institutions like Franklin Olin College of Engineering, Purdue University Polytechnic Institute and Station1, as well as Internationally, he serves on the boards of Global Minimum Inc (GMin) in Kenya and Agastya International Foundation (US) in India.
Sunand received his MDes in Industrial Design from the National Institute of Design in India, and holds a terminal graduate degree in Industrial Design and Human Factors from The Ohio State University.
Seminar
"Family-Centered and Community-Based Approaches to Global Mental Health: Meeting Children Where They Are"
Monday, December 14, 2020 at 10:00 a.m. EST
The global burden of mental health disorders is high among both adults and children. How can we address both, and how can children be reached most effectively? Dr. Puffer will discuss family- and community-based approaches to care for the hardest-to-reach families, including prevention and treatment strategies.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Eve Puffer is a global mental health researcher. She specializes in developing and evaluating child and family interventions in low-resource settings. Dr. Puffer also focuses on implementation science with a focus on community-based models of intervention delivery. She has worked extensively in Kenya and also conducts research on parenting and family-based interventions in humanitarian settings.
Seminar
Improving Early Childhood Development in Rural Ghana Through Scalable Community-Run Play Schemes
Monday, February 1st, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. EST
Dr. Krutikova will present findings from an evaluation of the impact of a scalable community-led play-based learning program on children’s cognitive development and health in rural Ghana. The Lively Minds program is a “hybrid” model that simultaneously targets home and pre-school environments through engaging parents in implementation of the programme in pre-schools. Encouraging results from this study motivated the government of Ghana to form a collaboration with Lively Minds and commit to a phased scaling the programme to 60 districts and 4,000 pre-schools, reaching 1.3 million children, starting in Septemeber 2021. Dr. Krutikova is working with the government of Ghana and Lively Minds to embed an RCT into this scale-up in order to evaluate its effectiveness. In this seminar, Dr. Krutikova will also discuss their plans for combining implementation and evaluation data to disentangle key ingredients for the success of this programme.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Sonya Krutikova is the Deputy Research Director at the Institute for Fiscal studies - an economics research institute based in London. She has a PhD in Economics and her research focuses on understanding the determinants of skill acquisition among children and young people living in poverty, as well as more broadly the mechanisms through which childhood conditions manifest in child development and outcomes.
Seminar
Keeping Mental Health on the Global Agenda: Opportunities at the Intersections
Monday, March 29th, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. EST
Over the last 30 years, mental disorders have remained among the most important drivers of global disease burden. Lessons learned in perinatal mental health, HIV prevention, care and treatment, and non-communicable disease management show that strategies for integrating care are feasible in high-resourced and lower resourced settings. Momentum is growing in global HIV programs and in the global mental health community to address the need for care alongside interventions to promote mental health and wellbeing. Two centers at UW directed by Dr. Pamela Collins-- UW Global Mental Health Program and the International Training and Education for Health (I-TECH)--are tackling these challenges and inviting opportunities for expanding implementation of evidence-based care and prevention of mental and substance use disorders.
Speaker
Dr. Pamela Collins is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington, where she is executive director of the International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH) and the UW Global Mental Health Program—an interdisciplinary program dedicated to the prevention and treatment of mental health conditions in low-resource settings locally and around the world. Prior to her current role, she was director of the Office for Research on Disparities & Global Mental Health and the Office of Rural Mental Health Research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) (USA). Her leadership led to the launch of research initiatives to extend mental health services in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as research to reduce mental health disparities among diverse racial and ethnic groups and Indigenous communities in the United States. Dr. Collins’s own research focuses on the intersections of mental health and HIV care in the US and sub-Saharan Africa and the mental health needs of urban adolescents in the global context. Dr. Collins completed her undergraduate studies at Purdue University. She obtained her M.D. from Cornell University Medical College and a Master of Public Health from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She completed residency training in psychiatry at Columbia University and postdoctoral fellowship training at Columbia University and Harvard Medical School. She was formerly an associate professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and College of Physicians and Surgeons
Seminar
Theory Based Implementation and Evaluation of Complex Interventions: Experiences from Ghana
Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. EST
Complex interventions consist of multiple interacting components and are often implemented in heterogeneous settings. While implementation scientists are encouraged to use theories to select context appropriate implementation strategies, in many situations, pre-existing theories do not exist, and theories need to be constructed from local knowledge. In this talk, we present several examples of how the Theory of Change approach typically used in program planning was used to develop implementation theories for programs of increasing complexity, and the evaluation approaches that have been designed and are in use to test these theories. While describing work still in progress, this seminar will share experiences of the process of theory building and implementation, lessons learned, results achieved to date, and evaluation approaches and challenges. This seminar will be of interest to researchers interested in evaluation in real life settings and practitioners seeking examples of the systematic application of implementation science theories and frameworks to real world settings.
Speaker
Dr. Rohit Ramaswamy, PhD, MPH
Dr. Rohit Ramaswamy is the Associate Director of the Public Health Leadership Program and a Professor in Maternal and Child Health at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the co-director of the UNC/RTI Consortium for Implementation Science. Dr. Ramaswamy’s area of expertise is applied Implementation and Improvement science, which deals with the development and evaluation of systematic methods and tools to sustainably implement and improve complex interventions. His work blends the tools of systems science, design thinking, implementation science and continuous quality improvement to build capacity for implementation. His global projects include the improvement of clinical and operational processes in tertiary maternity hospitals in Ghana, developing the quality improvement capability of district level government staff in Kenya and integrating mental health service delivery into the district primary health care system in India. His has developed and taught Implementation Science programs in South Africa and in Zambia. Dr. Ramaswamy has a Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, MS and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a MPH degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Graduate Diploma in Biostatistics from the University of Sydney.