Introducing some of the new YCSC community members who joined in this summer

The Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) – which serves as the department of child psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine – welcomes and introduces new community members on an on-going basis. All new faculty, staff, and trainees are invited to share bios and photos upon joining the department, and those who wish to participate are announced approximately monthly.

In addition to the nearly 30 new trainees who joined in early July, meet some of the new staff and faculty members who have joined the YCSC this summer: Maria Awwa in the Elevate Policy Lab, Jackie Britt-Friedman in the new YCSC Westport office, Chris Mansa Laporte with the Intensive In-Home Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Services (IICAPS) team, and Polina Ovchinnikova with Elevate and the MOMS Partnership®.

Maria Awwa, MA holds a master’s degree in school psychology from the University of Connecticut and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Barnard College. Prior to joining the YCSC, she worked in the mental health field in various capacities including clinical, developmental, and educational research, as well as in school psychology and private practice. As the new program administrator for the Elevate Policy Lab and MOMS Partnership®, she collaborates with other members of the Elevate team on multiple special projects, helps to manage internal changes and improvements, and serves as a liaison for administrative functions. She has a strong passion for championing and improving mental health access and services for all, particularly in under-resourced communities.

Jackie Britt-Friedman, PsyD is a clinical child psychologist with extensive experience both in schools and in clinical settings. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College, having been a member of Psi Chi, National Honor Society in Psychology, and a PsyD from Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology in the School-Clinical Child Program. She has supported children with a vast array of challenges including executive functioning weaknesses, learning disabilities, anxiety, mood difficulties, social skill deficits, and other stressors. She focuses on promoting resilience and helping children and adolescents develop skills to successfully navigate challenges. Key components of her work are collaboration, psychoeducation, and consultation. As an instructor at The Windward Institute, she has worked to advocate for children with language-based learning disabilities and disseminate research-based information to help educators and caregivers address their needs.

Brianna Cairney, PhD recently joined the YCSC as a Hilibrand postdoctoral fellow in the McPartland Lab. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, she earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Washington and completed a post-baccalaureate research fellowship conducting EEG/ERP and eye-tracking experiments that measured social cognition and sensory processing in autism. She completed her doctoral research at Louisiana State University where, in keeping within the themes of social cognition and multimodal processing, her research primarily focused on measuring the effects of co-speech gesture on memory and identifying associated underlying cognitive mechanisms. She is interested in continuing to study multimodal processing and speech-gesture integration in adolescents and adults with autism.

Chris Mansa Laporte, LMSW received his undergraduate degree from UMASS Dartmouth and his master's at Columbia School of Social Work. Prior to joining the IICAPS team, he worked as a clinician with the Continuum Care Youth Adult Services (YAS) program and Elm City COMPASS. A former athlete who played football in his high school and college years, he is the oldest of six siblings. He came to the United States at a very young age from Créteil, France. He is inspired to make a change in the world and uplift youths and families within the communities where he works. He hopes to one day create mentoring programs that bring youth and adults from all around the world together to connect through a summit.

Polina Ovchinnikova, MS earned her master’s degree at Yale, where she studied health informatics and data science at the School of Public Health and she served as a database curator for the ModelDB Curation Team, managing the most extensive online collection of computational neuroscience models. She has also worked as a statistical consultant and teaching fellow in biostatistics. Her research focuses on leveraging data-driven statistical analysis and health informatics skills to impact larger public health missions. She is proficient in R, SAS, and Python and holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Emmanuel College.