Yale Child Study Center hosts open house for internal & area providers

Well over 100 members of the Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) and Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS) community, along with other community providers in the greater New Haven area, attended this year’s YCSC open house last month. Previously held as an “in house” event for YCSC community members to connect and learn more about the varied work at the center, this now annual event that was revived post-pandemic in September 2023 was opened to the broader community for the first time this year.

This year’s open house was held on Thursday, September 19, 2024, with an additional goal of celebrating and recognizing the diversity and broad expertise across the varied missions of the center, which also serves as the department of child psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and YNHHS. Approximately 150 people attended.

Attendees learned about and explored nearly 50 clinical, community, policy, research, and model development teams represented from across the department. Along with shared knowledge, the event also offered refreshments and raffles – and for the first time, flash talks on a variety of topics and programs. Topics and speakers for the flash talks were as follows.

• Getting to know our inpatient child psychiatric unit with a therapeutic school: Dawn Sweeney, LCSW and Mary Gunsalus, MS

• Schema-based memory in early life trauma and psychopathology: Jordan Foster, MA

• Presidential policy platform for child and family mental health with triple bottom line Justice: Suzi Ruhl, JD, MPH

• Brain-based markers of emotion regulation in child mental health: Karim Ibrahim, PsyD

• Understanding autism’s nature & nurture: explorations of genetics and culture: Marcia Questel, MS Ed, BCBA and Allison To, BA

• ACCESS-Mental Health program: Signy Peck, LCSW

• McPartland lab research studies: Cara Keifer, PhD

Thanks to flash talk participant Katherine Babb, two video clips are available from the talk on policy, with Ruhl addressing “Triple Bottom Line” justice (i.e., around environmental, health, and economic issues) and Z codes, a mechanism for aligning health care with environmental risks/climate change. In addition to her role as a senior research scientist at the YCSC, Ruhl teaches a Yale School of Public Health course titled Climate Equity and Health Policy Methods that focuses on these topics.

The YCSC’s network and outreach committee organizes the open house, which requires a great deal of planning and collaboration each year. Led by Sandi Gossart-Walker, the committee consists of faculty, staff, and trainees including Craig Bailey, Diana Bok, Erin Brough, Kari Cifarelli, Heidi Grantz, Kristen Hammel, Bethany Kleine, Lesley Kurachi Ube, Alison Magnotti, Crista Marchesseault, Belmana Ponjevic, Marcia Questal, Anne Santello, Jennifer Seibyl, Denis Sukhodolsky, and Erin Warnick.

This year’s raffle prizes were as follows, with each winner noted.

• Panera Basket: Yamaira Ayala

• Insomnia Baskets: Jeff Vanderploeg and Jen Pjatak

• Super Sandwich Baskets: Veronica Meneses and Tiffany Turnbull

• Yale Campus Customs Basket: Roshani Treadwell

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