Project Investigators

Leslie Leve, Ph.D., is a principal investigator for the Center and director of the Center's Administrative Core. A professor in the College of Education, Dr. Leve is also an associate vice president for research and the associate director for the Prevention Science Institute. Her research focuses on the interplay between biological (genetic, hormonal), psychological, and social influences on child and adolescent development.

Philip A Fisher, Ph.D., is a principal investigator of the Center, a Philip Knight Endowed Professor of Psychology and the Excellence in Learning Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford. Dr. Fisher's work includes (a) studies to understand the effects of stress on the developing brain; (b) the development of two-generation prevention and treatment programs to improve high-risk children's well-being; and (c) advocacy for science-based policy and practice to improve healthy development in high-risk children.

Alice Graham, Ph.D., is a co-investigator for project 3 and an assistant professor of Psychiatry at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine. Dr. Graham is interested in how the early environment, starting in the prenatal period, influences brain development and risk for mental health disorders.

Anna C. Wilson, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Pediatrics at Oregon Health & Science University. Dr. Wilson is a pediatric psychologist who studies the impact of chronic pain conditions on families, with particular emphasis on parent and family factors that may influence adolescent pain experiences, physical function, and psychological health. Her longitudinal work is theoretically grounded, and integrates pain psychophysiology with developmental and pediatric psychology approaches. 

Beth Stormshak, Ph.D., is the principal investigator on project 2 and will focus on testing the efficacy of the Family Check-Up Online as a telehealth intervention for parents in rural Oregon to prevent opioid misuse and support healthy parenting. Dr. Stormshak's research focuses on the prevention of substance abuse and problem behavior using family-centered, community based prevention models. Over the past 25 years, her research has been funded by NIH, the CDC, and the Department of Education to prevent problem behavior and support positive outcomes for at-risk youth and families. 

Camille Cioffi, Ph.D., is a co-investigator on the Administrative Core. Dr. Cioffi is a Research Assistant Professor at the Prevention Science Institute at UO. She leads the Knowledge Dissemination Committee and CPO journal club. Her research focuses on improving health, mental health, and substance use outcomes among people with substance use disorders who are pregnant and parenting with a particular focus on highly stigmatized populations including people experiencing homelessness and people who inject drugs.

Damien Fair
University of Minnesota

Damien Fair, Ph.D., is the co-leader for the Data Science Core. Dr. Fair is a Professor in the Institute of Child Development and Medical School's Department of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota. He is also the Redleaf Endowed Director at the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain. He is an expert in functional brain imaging. His work includes examinations across the lifespan in healthy and disordered populations.

Dave DeGarmo, Ph.D., is co-leader for the Data Science Core and is the mentor for pilot 2. Dr. DeGarmo is a research associate professor at the UO Prevention Science Institute and faculty member in the Counseling Psychology and Human Services department. Dave is former Director of the Center for Assessment, Statistics, and Evaluation at the UO. Dave teaches courses on prevention science research methodology in the College of Education. His primary work focuses on evaluation of family stress models and the efficacy and effectiveness of parent training programs, with a substantive focus on fathering behaviors.

Elizabeth Skowron, Ph.D., is a co-investigator on the Pilot and Training Core and is a professor in Psychology at the University of Oregon. Dr. Skowron's research examines the neurobiology of parenting at-risk, developing self-regulation, and family interventions that are effective for supporting positive, healthy parenting and reducing child maltreatment.

Elliot Berkman, Ph.D., is lead of the Pilot & Training Core. Dr. Berkman is associate professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon where he directs the Social and Affective Neuroscience (SAN) Lab and is associate managing director of the Center for Translational Neuroscience. The work in the SAN Lab focuses on the neural and psychological mechanisms of goals, motivation, and behavior change in the context of real world behavioral goals such as tobacco cessation and dieting. 

Eric Feczko, Ph.D., is a co-investigator for the Data Science Core. Dr. Feczko, an early career scientist under the supervision of Dr. Fair, will assist in developing and implementing neuroimaging pipelines and analytics regarding heterogeneity and multivariate modeling across all projects. He will also provide training to other early career scientists in these advanced approaches. Dr. Feczko is a cognitive neuroscientist and Bioinformatics expert with over 15 years of experience in neuroimaging research and postdoctoral training with the National Library of Medicine. 

Jake Searcy, Ph.D., is a co-investigator on the Data Science Core. Dr. Searcy is an assistant research professor of Data Science in the Presidential Data Science Initiative at the UO; a university-wide program in data science that will provide an excellent network of connections with researchers using data science approaches across the University of Oregon and with partners in the state of Oregon and on the West Coast. 

Jennifer Pfeifer, Ph.D., is the leader of the science communication committee. Dr. Pfeifer is a professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon (UO), where she directs the Developmental Social Neuroscience (DSN) Lab and is the associate scientific director of the Center for Translational Neuroscience. She is also co-director of the National Scientific Council for the Developing Adolescent. Her research program focuses on characterizing periods of significant, manifold, and multi-level changes within adolescents over time that are believed to impact future mental health and health-risking behavior. Dr. Pfeifer has a particular interest in early adolescence, when transitions in peer and family relationships coincide with dramatic pubertal, neural, and identity development.

John Seeley, Ph.D., is a co-investigator on the Pilot and Training Core and is the co-investigator for project 2. Dr. Seeley is a professor in the Department of Special Education and Clinical Sciences. His research interests include emotional and behavioral disorders, school-based mental health intervention, research design and program evaluation, and digital health technology.

Kristen Mackiewicz Seghete, Ph.D., is the principal investigator (PI) for project 3. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University and the PI of the Stress, Cognition, Affect, and Neuroimaging (SCAN) lab. Dr. Seghete’s work broadly focuses on how aversive life experiences and psychopathology may interact with neuroplasticity across the lifespan to affect cognitive and emotional processing.The SCAN lab strives to engage in both basic science and translational research with the goal of informing preventive interventions for at-risk populations.

Nicholas Allen
University of Oregon

Nick Allen, Ph.D., is a co-investigator on project 2. He is the Ann Swindells Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oregon and the director of the Center for Digital Mental Health, where his work also focuses on using mobile and wearable devices to unobtrusively track and analyze behavior in order to detect mental health needs and provide adaptive, personalized interventions exactly when users need them.

Nicole Giuliani, Ph.D., is co-Investigator on project 1. She is an evergreen associate professor at the University of Oregon, where she is faculty in the School Psychology and Prevention Science programs. Her research focuses on how people regulate their own affect (known as self-regulation), how self-regulation is associated with health behaviors (e.g., eating unhealthy food), how that process is learned from parents in early childhood, and how interventions designed to increase supportive parenting behaviors affect these processes.

Sarah Feldstein Ewing, Ph.D., is a co-investigator for project 3. As the Prochaska Endowed Professor of Psychology and Interdisciplinary Neuroscience, Dr. Feldstein Ewing's work focuses on the connection between basic biological mechanisms (e.g., functional brain activation, brain structure, genetic factors) and health risk behavior (e.g., clinical symptoms, HIV risk behaviors, treatment outcomes).

William Cresko, Ph.D., is a co-investigator for the Data Science Core. Dr. Cresko is a professor of Biology and the director of the Presidential Data Science Initiative at the UO; a university-wide program in data science that will provide an excellent network of connections with researchers using data science approaches across the University of Oregon and with partners in the state of Oregon and on the West Coast.