Barnard Center Staff

Colleen O. Dillon, PhD

Colleen O. Dillon is a licensed psychologist with expertise in infant and early childhood mental health. As an Associate Teaching Professor and Faculty Lead on IECMH Training in the UW School of Nursing, Child, Family and Population Health Nursing, she teaches both graduate and undergraduate IECMH courses. Dr. Dillon’s graduate degrees are in clinical psychology (child/adolescent focus) from the University of Massachusetts, Boston; her APA residency year completed in the child/community track in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the UW School of Medicine. Dr. Dillon has served as a research fellow and associate member of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Network on the Transition from Adolescence to Adulthood, a clinical postdoctoral fellow at the UW Barnard Center for Infant Mental Health and Development, a graduate of the UW Infant Mental Health Certificate Program, and a UW Maternal and Child Health Leadership, Education and Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (LEND) trainee.  Her clinical and research focus over the past 20 years has been on supporting families through vulnerable lifespan transitions.

Jonika Hash, PhD, RN

Dr. Hash is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing. Her research interest includes sleep health and sleep health equity in families with young children. She received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Washington, PhD in Nursing Science from the University of Washington, and T32 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Omics and Symptom Science at the University of Washington. She has a clinical background in emergency room nursing. Dr. Hash’s research interest includes sleep health and sleep health equity in families with young children. Her dissertation examined early childhood sleep problems, social emotional development, and the impact of a strengths-based, infant mental health program on early childhood sleep problems within the context of adversity. Dr. Hash’s postdoctoral research examined sleep health knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and practices in mothers with young children, to inform tailored sleep health care. Key findings identified contextual factors linked to sleep health inequities.

Miriam Hirschstein, PhD

Miriam Hirschstein is a senior research scientist with the Barnard Center for Infant Mental Health and Development in Family, Child, and Population Health Nursing at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on implementation of school-based programs, children’s social-emotional development, and early relational health. She is principal investigator of a longitudinal study at Seattle Educare, one of 25 sites implementing a model of center-based early childhood education serving vulnerable children and families. She also leads an innovation grant supporting mindfulness practices in early childhood education. Dr. Hirschstein has a PhD in educational psychology and teaches in the UW School of Nursing and College of Education.

Nucha Isarowong, PhD, LICSW, IMH-E®

Nucha Isarowong is the Director of the Advanced Clinical Training Program at the Barnard Center for Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health on the campus of the University of Washington. His  clinical experience includes work with and on behalf of infants, children, and families in home and school settings. Most recently, he served as faculty at Erikson Institute in Chicago, IL, where he instructed classes in the Master of Social Work Program and the Infant Mental Health Certificate Program. His clinical and scholarship experience and interests address sociocultural, relational, and structural factors that influence social-relational dynamics and facilitate access to and utilization of resources and services by families caring for infants and children from the broad range of diverse communities. His current efforts focus on multi-level systems integration of diversity, equity, and inclusion principles in the context of father engagement practices and policies, integration of trauma-informed practice, generally, and in Part C Early Intervention, specifically, shifting understanding of disabilities and developmental differences, and affecting systems change. Nucha is a ZERO TO THREE Fellow (2012-2013), and currently serves on the coordinating council of the Academy of ZERO TO THREE Fellows. He also serves as a national workshop facilitator and member of the Curriculum Committee of the Diversity-Informed Tenets for Work with Infants, Children and Families.

Kristin Klansnic, MSW

Kristin Klansnic is a Research Coordinator for the Families Together study. Kristin has been a social worker in a variety of settings including child welfare, domestic violence shelters, and low-income family housing prior to joining the Barnard Center’s research team. She is passionate about working with families in the context of reunification and prevention of foster care placement. She has a BA in French and Anthropology from the University of Colorado and a Master of Social Work from the University of Washington.

Mary Jane Lohr, MS

Mary Jane Lohr is a Research Scientist in Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing and the School of Social Work at the University of Washington. She obtained her graduate degree in Educational Psychology specializing in Human Development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981, and began her career there working on research projects in the Women’s Studies Program and Department of Psychiatry. After moving to Seattle, Washington in 1987, she continued her career at the University of Washington in the School of Social Work, coordinating a longitudinal study of pregnant and parenting adolescents. Through this long-term study, she met Dr. Spieker who was a co-principal investigator and Dr. Oxford who was a research analyst at the time. In 2010, they invited her to join their research group at the Barnard Center in the School of Nursing.

Ms. Lohr’s current research projects at the Barnard Center include evaluating the Promoting First Relationships® (PFR) program with new mothers who received mental health treatment during pregnancy, and another evaluation with families recently reunified after a child was placed in foster care. In addition, she is coordinating a small private grant in the School of Social Work to evaluate an educational depression treatment intervention based on Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) with mothers involved with substance abuse, through the Washington State Parent Child Assistance Program (PCAP). Ms. Lohr coordinates the day-to-day operations of the grants including recruitment, intervention, data collection, coding, data management, analyses, manuscript preparation, and human subjects and grant reporting.  Her research interests have a theme of promoting mental health and well-being among vulnerable women and their families. She has directed nine NIH research grants, including four clinical trials.

Monica Oxford, MSW, PhD

Dr. Monica Oxford is a Research Professor in Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing at the University of Washington and the Executive Director of the Barnard Center for Infant Mental Health and Development. Her research focuses on early parenting and child developmental outcomes for vulnerable families living in challenging environments. Dr. Oxford’s interest is in how context, parenting, and child characteristics combine to inform particular patterns of child outcomes and how intervention services promote both caregiver and child well-being. Dr. Oxford is also involved in training social service providers throughout Washington on infant mental health, strengths-based practice, and how providers can support caregiver-child dyadic interaction from an attachment-based perspective.

Dr. Oxford is principal investigator of four NIH grants; the first three are aimed at examining the impact of Promoting First Relationships® (PFR: Kelly et al, 2008). PFR is a brief 10-week home visiting program that is strengths and relationship-based video feedback program. These three studies are randomized control trials in three populations: one RCT for parents involved with child protective services, one RCT for reunified birth families, and one RCT for American Indian families in a rural setting. The fourth NIH grant is aimed at addressing the interaction between family, school, child, and contextual risk such as poverty and early child developmental outcomes Dr. Oxford is also co-principal investigator on three NIH funded RCT testing the effectiveness of PFR in three additional populations (foster care, perinatal mental health setting, and American Indian rural setting).

Ivonne Poveda-Leyva

Ivonne Poveda-Leyva is a research coordinator at the Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing Department for the Barnard Center for Infant Mental Health and Development. As part of the center’s research team, via observation and data management, she supports numerous Parent-Child research programs focused on the quality and impact of this relationship on child development. Additional contributions are based on language and graphic communication.

Jennifer Rees, MSW

Kimberlee Shoecraft, MSW, LICSW, IMH-E®

Susan Spieker, PhD

Susan began her career at UW as a postdoctoral fellow with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Network on the Transition from Infancy to Early Childhood. Her scholarship has been focused on the development of infants and young children under conditions of adversity, and on refining and testing prevention and intervention programs to promote nurturing parent-child relationships in families experiencing adversity and/or coping with a child’s atypical development. Her research experience spans projects on infant child care and attachment, adolescent childbearing and child and family development, and randomized trials on prevention and intervention in Early Head Start and child welfare. She has been an investigator or principal investigator on over twenty federal grants, three of them focused on Promoting First Relationships®. Her current major study, funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Development, is Collaborative Perinatal Mental Health and Parenting Support in Primary Care, 2015-2020, is a randomized control trial studying the effectiveness of adding Promoting First Relationships® to perinatal mental health treatment for low income English and Spanish-speaking mothers.

Education

• PhD, Cornell University, 1982

What classes do you teach?

• NSG 432 Infants and Young Children: Risk and resilience
• NSG 537 Development and Psychopathology: Parents & Infants
• NURS548 Frameworks in Infant Mental Health
• NURS 569 Reflective Practice, Consultation and Supervision

Joyce Yang, MSW

Joyce is the Program Manager responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Advanced Clinical Training (ACT) and Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) Programs. She received her Master of Social Work degree from the University of Chicago. She spent the early part of her career working at a social service and immigrant rights non-profit that serves community members from 15 months to end-of-life as a Development & Outcomes Manager.