Cindy DeCoste, MS

Cindy DeCoste, M.S. is a Research Associate 2 in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. Her research interests lie in the impact of addiction and trauma on parenting, child development, and the formation of early relationships and attachments with caregivers, and in the implementation and dissemination of effective interventions for psychosocially vulnerable families. Since 2004, she has been the Project Director of a multi-stage NIDA-funded research program (PIs: Dr. Nancy Suchman and Dr. Thomas McMahon) that has been developing and evaluating interventions for mothers with substance use disorders: an attachment- and mentalization-focused intervention called Mothering from the Inside Out (MIO) and a psychoeducational intervention called Mommy and Me Growing Together (MMGT). She has made substantial contributions to developing, refining, and evaluating these interventions in three randomized clinical trials. She has been a lead trainer and supervisor for researchers and addiction counselors delivering MMGT and has played a major role in the development of treatment adherence and competence scales used in measuring counselor fidelity to both the MIO and MMGT interventions. She has traveled nationally and internationally to present study findings and to train other teams in the administration and coding of assessments used in evaluating the effectiveness of MIO and MMGT at improving the mother-child relationship.

Prior to joining this clinical research team, Ms. DeCoste spent five years managing the Infant Cognition Center in the Yale Department of Psychology (Director: Dr. Karen Wynn), where she collaborated on projects exploring how infants and young children reason and learn about their physical, social, and emotional worlds.

Ms. DeCoste is also a trained yoga instructor and has a long standing interest in mindfulness- and body-based approaches to stress reduction and trauma healing.