On October 17th, the annual meeting of the Child Study Center Associates was held at the Maurice R. Greenberg Conference Center. Each year, supporters of the Center’s mission and activities travel to New Haven to meet with faculty. New initiatives of the center and new progress on ongoing projects are at the center of the discussions held between the faculty and the associates. If a theme had been named for this year’s presentations, an appropriate one would have been New Innovations and Insights.
As always, the Center’s director, Fred Volkmar, welcomed the visitors and presided over the afternoon and evenings presentations by faculty. The first set of presentations were as diverse as the Center itself: junior faculty member Fred Shic presenting on the development of several new technologies to help patients with autism including apps for handheld devices and live, in the community eye tracking systems that can be used to promote improved social skills. Director of the Zigler Center, Walter Gilliam, presented on new technology being installed in the Center’s Cohen Auditorium that can provide distance learning at a level far beyond webinars and simple video-conferencing that will provide for the state of the art knowledge on early childhood education to be disseminated around the world. And Arnold Gesell Professor Linda Mayes and Megan Smith, Director of the New Haven Mental health Outreach for MotherS (MOMS) Partnership, presented on work to enhance children’s mental health by enhancing community by herself and many of her collaborators in New Haven and Grundy County, TN. Community was featured again later in the afternoon when Eli Lebovitz, assistant professor, discussed his trip to the Flathead Reservation through the Western United States. He shared stories of the communities that were shared with him on his trip and the threats to the mental health of children in those communities.
After a break, Paul Lombroso, Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology, moved discussions in the direction of individual treatment and the methods that he is pursuing with his research group to combat the cognitive deficits in many disorders. Wendy Silverman, the new Director of the Yale Child Study Center Program for Anxiety Disorders discussed psychotherapeutic approaches that she and her team are investigating to help the significant number of children with anxiety disorders who don’t get better on current treatments. Another junior faculty member, Michael Bloch, also discussed treatments that are tried for patients who have disorders that are difficult to treat, showing work that he has done concluding that the evidence in favor of some natural supplements for psychiatric disorders such as trichotillomania is biased. The way in which treatment for autism changes biological brain measures was the topic presented by Pam Ventola, who joined the faculty this summer. She discussed remarkable changes in functional MRI with pivotal response training for children with autism. To end the afternoon, Hanna Stevens, Associate Training Director of the Solnit Integrated Child Psychiatry Research Residency Program, reported on the origins and success of that innovative program which has trained many successful researchers.
The feature of the entire meeting was the moving presentation in the evening by Steven Marans, Director of the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence, who discussed on a very personal level the work of his team in Newtown, CT since the tragic shootings of last year. He shared the principles of trauma work that has helped his team approach such a tragedy, the insights he has gained from seeing the resilience of many children and families, and the successes of the Sandy Hook teachers and their students in their continued work together supported by the Yale Trauma Service. Many associate members openly shared their perception that the work of the Child Study Center has been particularly impressive over the past year and is a testament to the faculty with whom they shared the day—eating together, finding new inspiration from shared goals, and renewing mutual commitments to improving the lives of children and families.