We conduct rigorous research to understand what is working, what can be improved, and how to innovate within prenatal to age three services.
Meet our research team and check out our current studies below to learn more about how we advance our practice.
Robert T. Ammerman, Ph.D., is Professor of Pediatrics with a CCRF Endowed Chair at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and Scientific Director, Every Child Succeeds. He received his Ph.D. in 1986 in clinical psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Ammerman’s interests include early prevention programs, maternal mental health, trauma, and social/emotional development in children. He was co-developer of In-Home Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, an adapted CBT approach for low income, depressed mothers receiving home visiting. He is certified in cognitive and behavioral psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology, and he is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Clinical Psychology) and the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. Dr. Ammerman is the recipient of grants from the National Institute on Mental Health, Maternal and Child Health Bureau, and National Institute on Child Health and Development.
Jennifer R. Frey, Ph.D., BCBA-D, is an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and in the Division of General and Community Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She also serves as the President of Every Child Succeeds. She joined CCHMC and ECS after eight years on faculty at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
She earned her doctorate in education and human development from Vanderbilt University, where she was a Dunn Family Scholar of Psychological and Educational Assessment and recipient of the Melvyn I. Semmel Dissertation Award. Prior to her doctoral studies, she was a licensed early intervention specialist and early childhood special educator. She is a board-certified behavior analyst-doctoral level. She holds a Master of Education in Special Education and a Bachelor of Science, summa cum laude, in cognitive studies and child development from Peabody College of Vanderbilt University.
The overarching goal of her research is to improve long-term language and social-behavioral outcomes for young children with or at risk for developmental differences. She seeks to understand factors that influence early development and identify predictors of response to intervention in order to better meet the unique needs of individual children and their families.
She has published in the fields of special education, pediatrics, psychology, and speech-language pathology.
Dr. Beal is an Assistant Professor in Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology, where her research primarily emphasizes the overlap among maltreatment and foster care involvement, adolescent bio-psycho-social development and health risk behavior, adolescent and young adult substance use, and normative adolescent and young adult psychosocial development. Her graduate training in developmental psychology and quantitative methods has equipped her to understand the role of adolescence in shaping adult trajectories, how systems influence the developmental course, and methodological techniques that support the analyses of complex data to help us understand these processes. Her K01, funded by NIDA, augmented existing expertise in child welfare to better understand mechanisms linking child maltreatment to the health risk behaviors observed in foster youth, including increased substance use and sexual risk behaviors. This is accomplished using child welfare administrative data linked to electronic health record data from CCHMC and Ohio Department of Health Vital birth records for all children in Hamilton County Job and Family Services custody and a matched comparison sample. Recently, this project was extended by linking our cohort to ECS to understand the impact of a child welfare history on participation in ECS.
Dr. Bowers is an Associate Professor in the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. She trained in perinatal epidemiology with a focus on how exposures and complications during pregnancy can affect offspring development. Dr. Bowers has initiated several studies within ECS, including both health services and etiologic research. Her current research within ECS focuses on how maternal stress and other psychosocial exposures throughout the life-course, including pregnancy, can affect offspring development. The goal of this work is to improve home-visiting through two approaches: identifying biomarkers that help identify children at high risk for developmental impairment and to identify the timing when both adversity and protective factors have the greatest impact on development to inform home visiting services.
Cathy Stough is a pediatric psychologist with clinical and research interest in child eating behaviors, nutrition, and obesity. Dr. Stough is also director of the Healthy Bearcat Families Lab. Her research interests include weight management and eating behaviors of young children, including preschoolers, toddlers, and infants. Her research examines the relation of child appetite characteristics (e.g., satiety responsiveness, food responsiveness), parental feeding behaviors (e.g., using food to calm the child) or beliefs (e.g., fear of the child being underweight), and early growth trajectories (a risk factor for future obesity). Additionally, Dr. Stough's program of research develops and tests the efficacy of obesity prevention programs for young children, including children at risk for health disparities. Her research is funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.
To learn more about research projects being conducted in the Healthy Bearcat Families Lab, please visit the lab website at: https://sites.google.com/view/odarcc-healthy-kids-lab/home
Dr. Jessica Woo is an epidemiologist researching childhood obesity and nutrition, and their long-term impact on cardiometabolic health into adulthood. She is also interested in early-life exposures occurring during pregnancy and breastfeeding that may help establish developmental trajectories into childhood and beyond. Her significant expertise in how children develop relative to growth charting is related to her goal to understand whether there are critical periods in early life or key aspects of developmental exposures that may prevent future obesity and cardiometabolic diseases.
The Pregnancy and Infant Development (PRIDE) Study started in 2015 and is a longitudinal study that is trying to understand the effect that maternal stress during pregnancy has on children throughout the early years of life. The study looks at whether DNA methylation of stress response genes may serve as a biomarker of stress dysregulation resulting from prenatal distress exposure in utero, therefore providing an objective indicator of individuals at risk for developmental delays. Finally, the study is trying to determine the effectiveness of a neurobehavioral assessment tool for improving both maternal and offspring outcomes.
Publications:
Bowers, K., Ding, L., Gregory, S., Yolton, K., Ji, H., Meyer, J., Ammerman, R.T., Van Ginkel, J., Folger, A., 2018. Maternal distress and hair cortisol in pregnancy among women with elevated adverse childhood experiences. Psychoneuroendocrinology 95, 145–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2019.04.079
Folger, A; Ding, L; Ji, H; Yolton, K; Ammerman, R; Van Ginkel, J; Bowers, K: Neonatal NR3C1 Methylation and Social-Emotional Development at 6 and 18 Months of Age. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 2019:13 (published online, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2018.05.024)
Principal Investigators: Katherine Bowers, PhD, Alonzo (Ted) Folger, PhD
Staff: Beth Heeter
PRIDE Study Contact Information:
Phone Number: 513-636-6196
Fax Number: 513-636-7509
Email: PRIDEStudy@cchmc.org
Funding Sources: National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD)
NIMHD 1R01MD013006-01A1
Folger and Bowers (MPI)
07/26/19 – 02/29/24
Linking pre- and post-natal psychosocial determinants, DNA methylation and early developmental health disparities
NIMHD R56MD013006-01
Folger and Bowers (MPI)
09/25/18 – 09/24/19
Linking pre- and post-natal psychosocial determinants, DNA methylation and early developmental health disparities
The Every Child Succeeds (ECS) Biobank Study started in 2019 and is a three year grant funded by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. The purpose of the ECS Biobank is to enable researchers to study how the home and family environment impact health and child development, specifically in the Cincinnati community. This biobank will develop a birth cohort that includes biological and environmental specimens from mother-child pairs and their residences, respectively.
This study is in partnership with the Cincinnati Children’s Discover Together Biobank.
Principal Investigators: Katherine Bowers, PhD, Alonzo (Ted) Folger, PhD
Staff: Beth Heeter,
ECS Biobank Contact Information:
Phone Number: 513-636-6196
Fax Number: 513-636-7509
Email: ECSBio@cchmc.org
Discover Together Biobank Contact Information:
Phone Number: 513-803-7107
Funding Source: Cincinnati Children’s Academic and Research Committee
Obesity disproportionately affects youth from low-income or underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds. Youth who go on to develop severe obesity begin to deviate from their normal-weight peers in their growth trajectories by 4-6 months of age, making infancy and early childhood an ideal time for intervention. In collaboration with a home visiting program, Every Child Succeeds (ECS), and faculty from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, we will be developing an infant obesity prevention program, Healthy Eating for My Infant (HEMI). In order to create an intervention that is culturally and contextually relevant, meaningful, and useful for families, we will be working with families and the community to develop the intervention content. HEMI will target healthy eating among infants who are at risk for health disparities and obesity through behavioral and educational strategies. HEMI will consist of 6 adaptive home visit treatment sessions that promote problem-solving, healthy behaviors, readiness to change, goal setting, and self-monitoring. Families participating in HEMI are able to choose which treatment sessions they wish to receive based on their individual needs, and peer counselors will also be involved in delivery of sessions to help families utilizing their lived experience. We hope this intervention is the first step towards reducing obesity among at-risk youth by promoting development of healthy eating in infancy.
To learn more about research projects being conducted in the Healthy Bearcat Families Lab, please visit the lab website at: https://sites.google.com/view/odarcc-healthy-kids-lab/home
Principal Investigators: Cathy Stough, Jessica Woo
Staff: Jennifer Berndsen
Funding Source: Reducing Health Disparities through an Adaptive Healthy Eating Program for Underserved Infants in a Home Visiting Program (1R21NR019126-01A1)