About Us

Dr. Glenn Saxe, Principal Investigator of the CHAMP Center, is a Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine and an Investigator at the NYU Neuroscience Institute. Dr. Saxe’s primary research and clinical interests are the emotional, behavioral, and developmental consequences of traumatic events in children. His research has focused on determining factors that contribute to children’s risk for adverse outcomes following trauma and the identification of those factors to target with intervention that can lessen children’s risk. This research applies advanced computational data methods, including Machine Learning predictive modeling and Causal Data Science to large existing data sets to discover those factors most informative of risk and its prevention. Recently, Dr. Saxe and his team received over 7.6 million dollars in funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD) to establish the Center on Causal Data Science for Child and Adolescent Maltreatment Prevention (the CHAMP Center), one of NICHD’s four national CAPSTONE research centers on multidisciplinary research on child abuse and neglect. Dr. Saxe is also the director of the Center for Child Welfare Practice Innovation, a National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN)- affiliate category 2 center dedicated to advancing the care of traumatized children in the nation’s child welfare systems. Dr. Saxe and his colleagues developed Trauma Systems Therapy (TST), a widely used intervention for children with traumatic stress who live in environments with ongoing adversities. His team also developed the Never Look Away Trauma Training Program, a practical and widely scalable educational program - based on TST principles – for professionals in the child services system who work with traumatized children and their families.

Kathrine Sullivan is an Associate Professor at NYU Silver. Dr. Sullivan's primary research interest is the impact of trauma and other risk factors on family processes, particularly amongst the families of military service members and veterans. She is Co-Project Lead for Project 2 of the NICHD CAPSTONE P50 Center entitled the Center on Causal Data Science for Child and Adolescent Maltreatment Prevention (the CHAMP Center/Saxe PI/PD). She is also the principal investigator on a NICHD funded project: Parenting STAIR: Adapting a Trauma-Focused Parenting Intervention for Military Connected Mothers and Their Children.” Her work has been published in leading journals including Child Maltreatment, Family Process, Journal of Family Psychology, JAMA Pediatrics, Children and Youth Services Review, Social Work Research, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Journal of Military Veteran and Family Health, and Military Behavioral Health. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Dr. Sullivan spent six years as a community mental health clinician working with children and families who had experienced trauma, and on building a partnership between the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Children and Family Services in Los Angeles. These experiences in community mental health inform her teaching and current research agenda. She earned her PhD from the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. She received her MSW from the University of North Carolina School of Social Work and her BA in psychology from Williams College.

Dr. Constantin Aliferis is Chief Research Informatics Officer and member of the Executive Leadership Group of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI), Professor and Director of the Institute of Health and Informatics (IHI), and Chief Data Analytics Officer for the Integrated Health System, MHealth, at the University of Minnesota. He is Co-Lead for Project 1 and Co-Investigator in the Research Core of the NICHD CAPSTONE P50 Center entitled the Center on Causal Data Science for Child and Adolescent Maltreatment Prevention (the CHAMP Center/Saxe PI/PD). Prior to his positions at University of Minnesota, he was founding director of Vanderbilt University’s MS/PhD Program in Biomedical Informatics, and the founding director of the Vanderbilt Discovery Systems Laboratory (2001-2008). In October 2008, Aliferis was recruited to New York University to serve as founding director of NYU’s Center for Health Informatics and Bioinformatics, Director of the Biomedical Informatics Core of NYU’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (2008-2015). Dr. Aliferis’ research is focused on high dimensional modeling and analysis designed to transform biomedical data into novel actionable scientific knowledge. His three key areas of broad interest are (a) use of advanced informatics and analytics – particularly related to Causal Data Science - to accelerate and enhance the sophistication, volume, quality, and reproducibility of scientific research; (b) quality and cost improvements of healthcare using Big Data approaches; and (c) precision medicine. Dr. Aliferis was elected as a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 2007. Among other publications, he co-authored the first book on Precision Medicine Informatics (Springer 2020).

Kate Barral earned her Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences from Northeastern University in Boston in 2015. Following graduation, she began her career in public health as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala, where she focused on maternal and child health education, supporting pregnant women and mothers, and strengthening the capacity of local health center staff. After returning to the United States, Katherine transitioned to HIV prevention work with at-risk adolescents in Brooklyn, New York, where she gained experience leading teams and managing large-scale community health initiatives. Since 2022, Katherine has served as the Senior Program Coordinator for the Trauma Systems Therapy Training Center within NYU’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. In this role, she has deepened her expertise in trauma-informed education, child welfare, and mental health, and continues to find opportunities for professional growth and collaboration. Katherine is looking forward to completing her Master of Public Health, which she expects to complete in 2027.

Dr. Adam Brown is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. His professional career has been shaped by his strong commitment to bettering the lives of children and families who are struggling. Dr. Brown earned his Psy.D. from Yeshiva University and focused on Child and Family Development, with an emphasis on the treatment of mental health disorders. While he had an excellent education overall, there was no acknowledgement of traumatic stress in his graduate training. Since obtaining his doctoral degree, Dr. Brown has sought training on trauma and focused his career on providing assessment, treatment, and support to children and families who are impacted by traumatic events. In addition, Dr. Brown co-developed Trauma Systems Therapy (TST), a model for treating child traumatic stress. In his role as Lead Trainer for the NYU TST Training Center, he is responsible for implementing TST Programs in multiple regions of the U.S. and beyond, providing training, ongoing consultation, and technical assistance. Dr. Brown also collaborated on the development and implementation of Never Look Away (NLA), which is a training series designed to train professionals who work with children and families impacted by trauma in trauma-informed concepts and practices. He also co-developed an adaptation of NLA for foster parents. Dr. Brown has a national reputation as an expert in the field of Child Traumatic Stress as the result of his publications and presentations at multiple professional conferences. He has also served on several committees of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), an international organization focused on advancing the field of research and treatment of traumatic stress. Throughout his 14 years in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone, Dr. Brown has published multiple articles and book chapters, and co-authored the second edition of the TST Manual, published in 2015. He is dedicated to providing assessment and treatment to children, families, and adults with a variety of mental health concerns, and he is passionate about training and teaching developing mental health professionals.

Katina Chris is the Research Associate for The CHAMP Center in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Within The CHAMP Center, she works in preprocessing data for predictive and causal analyses where her work includes data cleaning, constructing scales, and composing data visualizations. Katina also assists with overall project coordination and contributes to the dissemination of knowledge and tools for the prevention of maltreatment for children at risk. Katina has previous experience in quantitative and qualitative research in behavioral psychology, as well as in various mentorship roles. Katina holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from the University of Central Florida.

Dr. Andrew F. Cleek is an expert on the scalable implementation of systems change initiatives, particularly related to healthcare reform, value based payments, Medicaid managed care, and trauma-informed services. He is the McSilver Institute’s Deputy Executive Director, where he oversees a portfolio of technical assistance offering training and support to all behavioral health, agencies in New York State. He additionally directs a number of initiatives involving trauma-informed care, early childhood mental health and the implementation of healthcare reform in New York, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. He was previously the institute’s Chief Program Officer. Prior to his tenure at the McSilver Institute, Dr. Cleek was the founding director of the Urban Institute for Behavioral Health, an association of 15 nonprofits dedicated to the implementation of evidence-based models in real-world settings. Dr. Cleek has 15 years of experience leading local and statewide, and national technical assistance activities to help nonprofits improve business, clinical, and administrative operations. Dr. Cleek holds a PsyD degree and an MA degree in Clinical Psychology from Spalding University; and a BA degree in psychology from California State University, Long Beach. He is also a Research Assistant Professor at the NYU School of Medicine.

Alex Fegler earned her B.A. in Biology from the University of Rochester in 2023, where she also completed a double minor in Psychology and Art History. During her time as an undergraduate, she began working in healthcare research with a focus on social determinants of health. She assisted in conducting an observational, qualitative study on the experiences of incident hemodialysis patients at Satellite Healthcare, for which she was published in 2024. As a senior, she supported data collection and measure development for a longitudinal observational study on the effects of poverty and childhood maltreatment on adult health outcomes as part of the University of Rochester’s Mt. Hope Family Center. Following her graduation, Alex moved to New York City where she joined the Center for Child Welfare Practice Innovation within NYU’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry as a program associate in 2024. She continues to investigate social determinants of health in this role through her work on federal program improvement grant projects with child welfare centers across the United States. Outside of work, Alex enjoys boxing, ceramic work, thrifting, and attending live music events.

Lydia Franco is Senior Director of Education and Innovation and a member of the Senior Leadership Team at the NYU McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research. She is also the Director of the Community Technical Assistance Center of New York (CTAC), a statewide training and technical assistance center for licensed mental health providers.

Dr. Ashley Fuss is the Director of Evaluation at the McSilver Institute. In this role, she leads data and evaluation initiatives with community partners and evaluation efforts across the portfolio of McSilver’s Technical Assistance Centers in New York State. Dr. Fuss has been working in the research, evaluation, and data analytics space for more than a decade across various academic, public sector, and private sector settings. She has expertise in both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies and has significant experience working with organizations to design and implement evaluation and research protocols to determine program impact and effectiveness. She received her MSW degree from Fordham University with a concentration in research, and her PhD degree from University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation work focused on behavioral health prevention for youth using machine learning techniques.

Genna is a project coordinator at the NYU McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy where she contributes to the implementation of evidence-based strategies and training for caregivers and healthcare professionals in New York who work with children from birth to five years old and birthing people in the perinatal period in order to encourage healthy social and emotional development. Genna has prior experience working in the New Jersey Public Schools as well as conducting psychological research and project management. Genna earned a Bachelor of Music in Trumpet Performance with a double major in psychology from New York University where she is also currently completing a Master in Social Work degree.

Dr. Steve Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Health Informatics and Associate Director of the CTSI (Clinical and Translational Science Institute) Health Informatics Program at the University of Minnesota. His research is focused on enhancing the secondary use of EHR (Electronic Health Record) data using healthcare data science and machine learning, improving clinical decision support and using rich ontologies to model clinical knowledge. Dr. Johnson oversees the research data warehouse and supports researchers in their use of clinical, genomic, image and unstructured data. He manages the University’s national research network collaborations including with the N3C, PCORNet, SenNet and All of Us. Prior to joining the University, he had a successful career as VP/CTO in leading healthcare companies where he led technology, product development and data analytics teams. Dr. Johnson received a Ph.D. in Health Informatics and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Erich Kummerfeld serves as a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota's Institute for Health Informatics. His primary research interest is in statistical and machine learning methods for discovering causal relationships, with a special focus on discovering causal latent variable models. His work includes (1) developing novel algorithms for discovering causal relationships and latent variables, (2) proving theorems about the properties of causal discovery and latent variable discovery algorithms, (3) performing benchmark simulation studies to evaluate features of the algorithms that are difficult or impossible to evaluate by other means, and (4) applying these novel algorithms to health data in order to inform the development of new treatments. Dr. Kummerfeld received his Ph.D. In Logic, Computation and Methodology from Carnegie Mellon University.

Sisi Ma is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine, Institute for Health Informatics. She is Project Lead for Project 1 of the NICHD CAPSTONE P50 Center entitled the Center on Causal Data Science for Child and Adolescent Maltreatment Prevention (the CHAMP Center/Saxe PI/PD). Dr. Ma's primary research interest is the application of statistical modeling, machine learning, and causal analysis methods in the field of biology and medicine. Specifically, her approaches include: (1) devising and implementing new causal discovery methods that are specifically tailored to the characteristics of biomedical data, (2) benchmarking novel and existing causal discovery and predictive modeling methods in order to evaluate their efficacy on biomedical data, (3) designing analytical experiments to discover critical contributing factors to pathologies and diseases from multimodality high dimensional high volume data to aid the development of diagnostic technologies and identification of potential treatment targets. She received a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience and MS in Computer Science from Rutgers University.

Michelle Papp (she/her) is the Project Coordinator for the CHAMP Center in the Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, where she previously served as the Project Coordinator for the NIMH-funded R01 grant Computational Models for the Prediction and Prevention of Child Traumatic Stress (PI: Glenn Saxe, MD). In her current role, she coordinates data pre-processing for research using existing datasets as they are prepared for predictive and causal analyses. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from New York University College of Arts & Science, and has over 5 years of experience in project management and data analysis in support of a multi-institutional P30 Center of Excellence in her former role at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Amanda Ritchie is Director of Center Operations at the Constance and Martin Silver Center on Data Science and Social Equity at New York University. Before joining the Center, Amanda was Research Scientist and Project Director at NYU on a number of large NIH-funded research studies on health disparities and HIV. She has nearly 20 years of experience in social and behavioral science research and capacity building, including work with the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research and the Latino Commission on AIDS. Amanda holds a master's degree in Applied Anthropology from the University of Maryland at College Park, and a BA in Anthropology and Spanish from SUNY Geneseo.

Dr. Michele Santacatterina is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Biostatistics at NYU Langone’s Department of Population Health. He currently serves as a Research Advisor at Google DeepMind and served as a Visiting Researcher at Google from 2022-2025. Before joining NYU Langone, Dr. Santacatterina was an Assistant Research Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at the Biostatistics Center and the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at George Washington University. He received a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, in April 2018, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cornell TRIPODS Center for Data Science and Cornell Tech in August 2020. Dr. Santacatterina's research focuses on the development and applications of statistical and data science methods for optimal decision-making using real-world and experimental data.

Whitney Wortham, MSW, MPH, is a PhD Candidate at the Silver School of Social Work at New York University. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Whitney served as the Family Grants Project Director, working on an early childhood System of Care grant with the District of Columbia Department of Behavioral Health and a five-year SAMHSA-funded project focused on expanding early access to integrated behavioral health and trauma-specific interventions for children, adolescents, and families in Washington, DC. She also has clinical experience implementing evidence-based practices with children and families in community settings. Whitney’s research interests include mental health services research, implementation science, and evidence-based practice with youth and families, with a focus on front-line practices that strengthen linkages to mental health services within the child welfare system. She holds an MSW from Fordham University, an MPH from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and a BA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.