Robert T. Ammerman, Ph.D.

Robert T. Ammerman, Ph.D., is Professor of Pediatrics with a CCRF Endowed Chair at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and Scientific Director, Every Child Succeeds. He received his Ph.D. in 1986 in clinical psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Ammerman’s interests include early prevention programs, maternal mental health, trauma, and social/emotional development in children. He was co-developer of In-Home Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, an adapted CBT approach for low income, depressed mothers receiving home visiting. He is certified in cognitive and behavioral psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology, and he is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Clinical Psychology) and the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. Dr. Ammerman is the recipient of grants from the National Institute on Mental Health, Maternal and Child Health Bureau, and National Institute on Child Health and Development.

Cincinnati Children’s Ammerman Lab

Alonzo (Ted) Folger, Ph.D.

Dr. Folger is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s and the Director of Evaluation and Epidemiology at Every Child Succeeds. Dr. Folger earned a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Cincinnati and started at Cincinnati Children’s in 2012. His research focus includes evaluation of home visiting, DNA methylation, and child development.

Jennifer R. Frey, Ph.D., BCBA-D

Jennifer R. Frey, Ph.D., BCBA-D, is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and in the Division of General and Community Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She also serves as the President of Every Child Succeeds. She joined CCHMC and ECS after eight years on faculty at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

She earned her doctorate in education and human development from Vanderbilt University, where she was a Dunn Family Scholar of Psychological and Educational Assessment and recipient of the Melvyn I. Semmel Dissertation Award. Prior to her doctoral studies, she was a licensed early intervention specialist and early childhood special educator. She is a board-certified behavior analyst-doctoral level. She holds a Master of Education in Special Education and a Bachelor of Science, summa cum laude, in cognitive studies and child development from Peabody College of Vanderbilt University.

The overarching goal of her research is to improve long-term language and social-behavioral outcomes for young children with or at risk for developmental differences. She seeks to understand factors that influence early development and identify predictors of response to intervention in order to better meet the unique needs of individual children and their families.

She has published in the fields of special education, pediatrics, psychology, and speech-language pathology.

Sarah J. Beal, Ph.D.

Dr. Beal is an Assistant Professor in Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology, where her research primarily emphasizes the overlap among maltreatment and foster care involvement, adolescent bio-psycho-social development and health risk behavior, adolescent and young adult substance use, and normative adolescent and young adult psychosocial development. Her graduate training in developmental psychology and quantitative methods has equipped her to understand the role of adolescence in shaping adult trajectories, how systems influence the developmental course, and methodological techniques that support the analyses of complex data to help us understand these processes. Her K01, funded by NIDA, augmented existing expertise in child welfare to better understand mechanisms linking child maltreatment to the health risk behaviors observed in foster youth, including increased substance use and sexual risk behaviors. This is accomplished using child welfare administrative data linked to electronic health record data from CCHMC and Ohio Department of Health Vital birth records for all children in Hamilton County Job and Family Services custody and a matched comparison sample. Recently, this project was extended by linking our cohort to ECS to understand the impact of a child welfare history on participation in ECS.

Visit the Child Welfare Research Lab.

Katherine A. Bowers, Ph.D.

Dr. Bowers is an Associate Professor in the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. She trained in perinatal epidemiology with a focus on how exposures and complications during pregnancy can affect offspring development. Dr. Bowers has initiated several studies within ECS, including both health services and etiologic research. Her current research within ECS focuses on how maternal stress and other psychosocial exposures throughout the life-course, including pregnancy, can affect offspring development. The goal of this work is to improve home-visiting through two approaches: identifying biomarkers that help identify children at high risk for developmental impairment and to identify the timing when both adversity and protective factors have the greatest impact on development to inform home visiting services.

John S. Hutton, MD

Dr. Hutton is a pediatrician and assistant professor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He graduated with honors from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and completed pediatric residency and a National Research Service Award (NRSA) fellowship at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. His research focus is to better understand the role of home reading environment and interventions on emergent literacy (the skills and attitudes preparing a child for reading), early brain development supporting this process, and screening skills and risk factors in primary care settings.

Dr. Hutton is Director of the Reading & Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Healthy Eating for My Infant (HEMI)

Obesity disproportionately affects youth from low-income or underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds. Youth who go on to develop severe obesity begin to deviate from their normal-weight peers in their growth trajectories by 4-6 months of age, making infancy and early childhood an ideal time for intervention. In collaboration with a home visiting program, Every Child Succeeds (ECS), and faculty from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, we will be developing an infant obesity prevention program, Healthy Eating for My Infant (HEMI). In order to create an intervention that is culturally and contextually relevant, meaningful, and useful for families, we will be working with families and the community to develop the intervention content. HEMI will target healthy eating among infants who are at risk for health disparities and obesity through behavioral and educational strategies. HEMI will consist of 6 adaptive home visit treatment sessions that promote problem-solving, healthy behaviors, readiness to change, goal setting, and self-monitoring. Families participating in HEMI are able to choose which treatment sessions they wish to receive based on their individual needs, and peer counselors will also be involved in delivery of sessions to help families utilizing their lived experience. We hope this intervention is the first step towards reducing obesity among at-risk youth by promoting development of healthy eating in infancy.

To learn more about research projects being conducted in the Healthy Bearcat Families Lab, please visit the lab website at: https://sites.google.com/view/odarcc-healthy-kids-lab/home

Principal Investigators: Cathy Stough, Jessica Woo

Staff: Jennifer Berndsen

Funding Source: Reducing Health Disparities through an Adaptive Healthy Eating Program for Underserved Infants in a Home Visiting Program (1R21NR019126-01A1)