The Yale Child Study Center welcomes new community members on an on-going basis, and all new faculty, staff, and trainees are invited to share bios and photos upon joining the YCSC. A belated welcome is extended to Youcai Yang, PhD, who joined the YCSC as a visiting associate professor in September, while Selin Kelly, LMSW and Veronica Meneses, MD joined the department the first week in November.
Selin Kelly, LMSW: Prior to joining the YCSC as a Clinical Social Work Fellow, Kelly received a master's in social work from Columbia University School of Social Work. She graduated from the Advanced Clinical Practice Track with a specialty field of practice in Family, Youth, and Children's services. During her graduate training, she worked with rural and disenfranchised communities in Montana, providing mental health services to underserved populations. She completed her internships in hospice, focusing on end-of-life care and grief, as well as in the emergency department, where she served high-acuity needs and provided crisis interventions. Her clinical interests include exploring the intersection of developmental and complex trauma, attachment, and grief. She is passionate about implementing evidence-based therapeutic modalities from a holistic perspective for children and families from diverse backgrounds.
Veronica Meneses, MD: With a joint faculty appointment in the Department of Pediatrics and the YCSC, Meneses’ academic and clinical interests include autism in children with chronic medical conditions and disabilities, continuity of health care for children with spina bifida, including facilitating their transition to adulthood, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children with complex medical diagnoses. She received her medical degree at Cornell University and completed her internship at The University of Texas Houston and subsequent residency training in General Pediatrics at Loma Linda University in California. After residency, she became a Fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where she earned a Master of Science in Health Services Research from the School of Public Health. She then completed a three-year fellowship in Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. She then worked in Pediatric Developmental Disabilities at Scottish Rite for Children in Texas and earned the rank of Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Southwestern, where she served as Program Director for the inaugural Developmental-Behavioral Pediatric Fellowship.
Youcai Yang, PhD: Yang is an associate professor at East China Normal University. After receiving his PhD in psychology from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in 2018, he returned to China and mainly focused on neurological and behavioral research on anxiety and other affective disorders in children and adolescents and the impact on cognitive control. As well as studying how to effectively prevent and treat them through exercise intervention. He mainly uses eye-tracking, EEG, fNIRS, and fMRI to understand the relationships and mechanisms behind them.