Biography

J. Lawrence Aber, PhD is the Willner Family Professor of Psychology and Public Policy at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and University Professor at New York University. He received his Ph. D. in Clinical-Community and Developmental
Psychology from Yale University. His basic research examines the influence of poverty and violence, at the family and community levels, on the social, emotional, behavioral, cognitive and academic development of children and youth. Currently, he conducts research on the impact of poverty and HIV/AIDS on children’s development in South Africa (in collaboration with the Human Sciences Research Council), the impact of preschool teacher training quality and children’s learning and development in Ghana (in collaboration with Innovations for Poverty Action) and on school- and community-based interventions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, Sierra Leone and Lebanon (in collaboration with the International Rescue Committee).

Vikram Patel, Professor and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, will join Harvard Medical School as the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health in April 2017. He is Joint Director of the Centre for Chronic Conditions and Injuries at the Public Health Foundation of India and is co-founder of Sangath, an Indian NGO which won the MacArthur Foundation’s International Prize for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2008. He is a recipient of the Chalmers Medal (Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, UK), the Sarnat Medal (US Institute of Medicine), an Honorary Doctorate from Georgetown University, the Pardes Humanitarian Prize (the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation), and an Honorary OBE from the UK Government. He was listed in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential persons of the year in 2015. His primary areas of expertise are mental health and adolescent health.

Theresa S. Betancourt, ScD, MA, is Associate Professor of Child Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity. Her central research interests include the developmental and psychosocial consequences of concentrated adversity on children, youth and families and applied cross-cultural mental health research. She is Principal Investigator of a longitudinal study of war-affected youth in Sierra Leone which led to the development of group interventions now being scaled up in collaboration with the government of Sierra Leone and the World Bank. She developed and evaluated the impact of a Family Strengthening Intervention for HIV-affected children and families and is now investigating the impact of a home-visiting early childhood development intervention in Rwanda. Domestically, she is engaged in community-based participatory research on family-based prevention of emotional and behavioral problems in refugee children resettled in the U.S.

Lucie Cluver, DPhil, works closely with UNICEF, WHO, PEPFAR-USAID and the South African government to develop evidence for children and adolescents affected by AIDS. All her work is with an incredible team of collaborators, postdocs and doctoral students in South Africa and the UK. Together, the team leads a set of randomized controlled trials on child abuse prevention and HIV-support in Southern Africa, which are perpetually beset by riots, armed robberies and the occasional military coup. They also have two longitudinal cohorts – of 3500 adolescents across nine provinces in South Africa, and of 1500 HIV-infected adolescents and community controls. She believes that children in Southern Africa deserve the highest quality research, and that science should be at the service of the most vulnerable.

Gauri Divan MBBS, MRCPCH, is a paediatrician at the NGO Sangath (www.sangath.com) since 2002. She works in the areas of early child development, developmental disabilities and adolescent health. She is site principle investigator for the Sustainable PRogram Incorporating Nutrition and Games (SPRING) a trial in India, which is evaluating an innovative intervention designed around the WHO-UNICEF Care for Child Development Package. She was part of the three country collaboration which resulted in the recently published first-ever randomised control trial conducted from a low resource setting for a communication intervention for Autism. The Parent mediated intervention for Autism Spectrum disorder in South Asia (PASS) trial, evaluated the ‘task-sharing’ approach for the delivery of an evidence-based intervention from the UK, and was showcased at the World Innovation Summit for Health 2016. She is part of consultative resource groups for the Ministry of Health in India and for the World Health Organization for developmental disabilities.

3-050 - Innovative Programs for Children in Developing Nations

Session Type: Invited SRCD Salon

Sub Unit

• Invited Program on Poverty, Inequality & Developmental Science

Moderator

• J. Lawrence Aber, New York University

Panelists

• Theresa Betancourt, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health

• Lucie Cluver, Oxford University

• Gauri Divan, Sangath