Yale Child Study Center (YCSC) trainees Laura Gallardo, Isaac Johnson, and Kristina Washington have been selected as recipients of the Viola W. Bernard Social Justice & Health Equity Fellowship for 2024-2025. Brief bios for each of these outstanding trainees are as follows.
Laura Gallardo, MSW is a postgraduate associate and social work fellow at the YCSC. She earned a master’s in social work with a concentration in cultural competence from the University of Texas at San Antonio. During her graduate training, she participated in the Graduate Archer Fellowship as an intern with Pear Therapeutics and completed social work internships at both the City of San Antonio and Family Service of San Antonio. Gallardo is an advocate for accessibility for disadvantaged communities, particularly through culturally responsive intervention planning on all levels from individual to federal. She enjoys working with children and is passionate about providing services that are effective, and trauma informed.
Isaac Johnson, MD is a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at the YCSC. He earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and graduated from medical school at Yale. He completed his adult psychiatry residency at the University of California, San Francisco, where he was active in the Cultural Psychiatry Area of Distinction. During residency, he spent two years as an American Psychiatric Association Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellow and served on the APA Council on International Psychiatry. He is a member of an international research workgroup called the Early Childhood Peace Consortium. He has pursued additional psychotherapy training opportunities in psychodynamic psychotherapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy. At the YCSC, he has appreciated the opportunity to teach medical students and has conducted research on various topics pertaining to low-resource settings, including on implicit racial bias.
Kristina Washington, PhD is a postdoctoral trauma fellow at the YCSC. She earned her doctoral degree at Lehigh University and received her bachelor’s degree in psychology and criminology and a minor in children maltreatment advocacy studies from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research and clinical foci encompass disrupting the school to prison pipeline through prevention and intervention along the continuum. Washington is passionate about serving youth who have experienced traumatic events, serving minoritized youth and their families, and serving youth with disabilities. Her dissertation is the culmination of her interests which uses ecological systems theory to examine how parenting, neighborhood context, and peers impact the mental health and school functioning of incarcerated adolescents.
Supported by the Viola W. Bernard Fund for Innovation in Mental Health Care and developed by YCSC Vice Chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tara Davila, the Viola Bernard fellowship provides an annual opportunity for three current trainees to contribute to the department’s commitment to health equity and social justice within the psychiatry, psychology, and social work training programs. The opportunity is intended to enhance the training experience of YCSC trainees.