Recognizing Fall 2025 Award Recipients at Yale Child Study Center

Several internal funding opportunities are open to faculty, clinicians, or trainees at Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) throughout each academic year. Recipients are announced internally on an on-going basis. The following awardees were announced this fall.

This annual fund supports researchers and clinicians with a primary appointment at the YCSC. The purpose is to provide start-up funds to develop research, educational, and clinical efforts that will contribute to research faculty and clinician growth and development. The fall 2025 awardees and the respective conferences for which they applied for support were announced in early December, as follows.

• Daryn David, PhD: Pari Principles of Consciousness Education Symposium

• Megan Goslin, PhD: Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress at Kennedy Krieger’s 10th biennial Trauma Conference: Addressing Trauma Across the Lifespan-Hope and Healing in Times of Environmental Stress

• Katherine Malensek, LPC: European Consortium for Arts Therapies Education (ECRATE) 18th European Arts Therapies Conference

This annual opportunity, launched in early 2024, offers awards of up to $1000 each to YCSC postdoctoral associates to reimburse and/or contribute to the costs associated with attending and/or presenting research at national and international academic scientific conferences. The fall 2025 award recipients, along with their faculty mentors, were as follows.

• Nicola Hohensee, PhD (Mentor: Christine B. Cha, PhD)

• Lacey Chetcuti, PhD (Mentor: Dr. James McPartland, PhD)

• Michael F. McCarthy, PhD (Mentor: Christina Cipriano, PhD, MEd)

• William Carson, PhD (Mentor: James McPartland, PhD)

Made possible through a generous donation to the center, this award offers up to $20,000 in research funding to support innovative pilot studies investigating the impact of social media on child and adolescent mental health and development. This new funding opportunity, finalized in early 2025, aims to advance the understanding of both positive and negative effects of social media on youth well-being and contribute to evidence-based recommendations for healthy social media use among children and adolescents. Announced internally this past spring, the 2025 awardees and their proposal titles are as follows.

• Christine Cha, PhD, and Shirley Wang, PhD: Development of digital phenotypes to distinguish harmful from helpful moments of social/digital media use across the lifespan

• Eli Lebowitz, PhD; Rebecca Etkin, PhD; and Wendy Silverman, PhD: Social Media and Social Anxiety: A Longitudinal and Ecologically-Valid Investigation of Bidirectional Effects

• Marc Potenza, MD, and Jennifer Park, PhD: Network analysis and adolescent-informed strategies to address co-occurring problematic social media use and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

• Karim Ibrahim, PsyD: Is 'TikTok Brain' real? Effects of Social Media Content on Attention, Impulse Inhibition and Emotion Regulation in Youth With and Without ADHD

Generously supported by the Viola W. Bernard Fund for Innovation in Mental Health Care, the Viola W. Bernard Fellowship was launched in 2023 to provide an annual opportunity for three fellows within YCSC psychiatry, psychology, and social work training programs to consider and address the mental health care needs of children and families facing economic adversity, with a focus on access to health care. An accompanying award includes a stipend of $1,500 and a discretionary budget of $4,000 to be used over 12 months to support related programming and activities. This past summer, the following YCSC trainees were selected to receive this award and named Viola W. Bernard Fellows for 2025-2026.

• Anthony Cifre, PhD

• Alexandra Desir-Clarke, MD

• Ulunma N. Umesi, MD

Established in 2022 and also supported by the Viola W. Bernard Fund for Innovation in Mental Health Care, the Viola W. Bernard Prize funds pilot work on an innovative model benefiting children, youth, and families in a community setting. The annual award encourages rapid prototyping, implementation, and testing of potential new mental health care delivery models and offers research and/or salary support for a related and approved project. This year’s winner was Sophie Lembeck, LCSW, for the development of a proposed project titled, Focus Groups for Mental Health Equity and Attendance Reform at Metropolitan Business Academy.

In addition to these application-based awards, several internal awards for faculty and staff are announced at an annual recognition ceremony each June. YCSC community members can learn more about these awards—some of which are open to nomination each spring—in addition to the internal funding opportunities and more via the department intranet on SharePoint.