Robert T. Ammerman, Ph.D.

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.

Cincinnati Children’s Ammerman Lab

Jennifer R. Frey, Ph.D., BCBA-D

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.

Sarah J. Beal, Ph.D.

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.

Visit the Child Welfare Research Lab.

Katherine A. Bowers, Ph.D.

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.