August 2020 Newsletter

Spotlight: Jared Parrish, Cohort Five Fellow

Jared Parrish is the Senior MCH Epidemiologist at the Alaska Division of Public Health and Co-Chair of the Alaska Statewide Violence and Injury Prevention Partnership. Jared works to identify methodological challenges with population-based child maltreatment research and create new data sources or analytical approaches to solving them. Focused on prevention, his research interests center on the longitudinal health impacts of the pre-birth family and early childhood environments and experiences. He is interested in translating data into information that promotes cross-sector action resulting in measurable outcomes.

He is currently working on four main projects:

He developed and is expanding the sources included in the Alaska Longitudinal Child Abuse and Neglect Linkage project (ALCANLink). He recently linked in education records and developed population-level prediction models to school readiness and 3rd grade reading scores. He is currently expanding the data to include HeadStart and other early learning data. He is interested in measuring the impact of the disrupted learning due to COVID-19 on reading scores and future health impacts.
Using data from ALCANLink, he identified pre-birth household challenges that predict elevated early childhood ACE scores. Using this information the State applied for and obtained an 1115 Medicaid waiver to enable health care providers to bill for ACEs prevention efforts. In conjunction with this work, he is creating a tool for providers to screen for household challenges during the pre-birth window, rank components identified and then suggest diagnostic tools for further investigation of each identified component.
Supported by the Child Maltreatment Incidence Data Linkages project, he is replicating ALCANLink in Oregon. Preliminary results suggest replication of the ALCANLink methods are feasible, economical, and internally valid of the entire statewide birth cohort. Efforts are underway to create a complete replication “tool-kit” for other jurisdictions.
Through braided local funding, he is developing a fatal maltreatment classification tool to operationalize the public health approach within the child death review model. These methods utilize public health recommendations to standardize the threshold for reviewing caregiver behavior. Efforts to test the reliability of classification are underway.

The Doris Duke Fellowship expanded Jared’s view on different approaches to supporting child well-being and drastically increased his network of professionals in different fields of study. Jared said, “I’ve developed a much broader definition of prevention using an intergenerational life course perspective, and believe that strong evidence-based interventions in one generation lead to prevention in the next and that treating the family unit opposed to the individual is critical when addressing a complex issue like child maltreatment.”

Jared also mentioned that one benefit of the Fellowships he was not expecting was the increased ability to communicate with a diverse group of professionals and form strong connections through shared language and terminology.

Fellows Job Search Panel and Discussion Forum

On Friday, August 21, five Fellows from a variety of professions and disciplines served as panelists for a Job Search Discussion Forum. Carly Dierkhising, Lisa Schlebe, Bart Klika, Ericka Lewis, and Francesca Longo shared their job search, and general career experiences with fellows, as well as answered questions.

This forum was designed with hopes of being the first in a series of professional development forums that fellows and the Leadership Committee will be developing.

Fellows Published in Child Welfare Textbook

Four fellows, Nathanael Okpych, Megan Feely, Megan Finno-Velasquez, and Megan Hayes Piel, are chapter contributors in the new textbook: Introduction to Child Welfare: Building a Culturally Responsive, Multisystemic, Evidence-Based Approach. This textbook is intended to help future and current child welfare professionals to employ and embrace cultural humility in their work, as well as recognize intersectionality and diversity of children, youth, and families.

Fellows Updates:

Wendy Ellis has two professional highlights:

She has been appointed as Assistant Professor in Global Health at George Washington University and will be teaching an “Inequity in Policy" that will teach public health students the implications of significant U.S. Social and Criminal Policy that drives inequity and adversity in communities today.
She was also named one of University of Washington School of Public Health 50 Changemakers of Public Health for their 50th anniversary.

Nathanael Okpych has two publications:

The first article was published in Children and Youth Services Review on the roles of Campus-Support Programs and Education Training Vouchers on college persistence for youth with foster care histories.
The second article was published in The Journal of Adolescent Health on mental health management among older youth in foster care.

Judith Scott published an op-ed with her doctoral student mentee in The Hill on the Black homicide epidemic and a call for prevention and justice.

Kelley Fong has two updates:

She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Georgia Tech.
She recently published a brief with the Council on Contemporary Families on why child protective services investigates so many families. This brief is based on her research that was just published in the August issue of the American Sociological Review.

Lindsay Zajac has two updates:

She started a postdoctoral fellowship at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia receiving specialized training in perinatal mental health and early childhood.
She also co-authored an article that was recently published in Psychoneuroendocrinology on parenting sensitivity and the effect of Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up on cortisol in middle childhood.

Kate Marcal has a new publication in the journal of Child and Family Social Work on caregiver depression and child behavior problems.

April Allen, published an article in the Child Welfare Journal on understanding the role of coaching in implementing and sustaining interventions in child welfare.