Meet the Collaborative

Deborrah Bremond, Ph.D., MPH is a licensed mental health professional specializing in infant and early childhood mental health.  She trained at the Infant Parent Program at UCSF department of psychiatry and in a variety of early childhood mental health settings.  Dr. Bremond helped direct the implementation of CA First 5 in Alameda County for 11 years. She has a broad range of experience conceptualizing, developing, and implementing integrated service delivery models for families with young children. She has sought to integrate the importance of early social and emotional development into early care and education sites, neonatal follow-up programs and primary pediatric care settings. The past 10 years she has worked as a consultant on several projects; WestEd, Center for Early Intervention, The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, CA Project Launch (2009-2013), and Save the Children.  She helped develop and teach the curricula for the Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health course at California State University East Bay.  She is co-author of The Learning Curve (imhlearningcurve.org) a self-assessment tool that helps one explore their knowledge of early child development and to figure out areas for self-improvement.

Deborrah a Zero to Three Harris Graduate Fellow, a member of the California Association of Infant Mental Health and a CA Endorsed Reflective Practice Mentor. She received her doctorate from the Wright Institute and later a Masters in Public Health, Maternal and Child Health from University of California Berkeley.

Elvia Cortes, PhD, is the founder and executive director of FINE Infant Program, an early intervention program, leading in-home visitors and mental health practitioners providing direct services to children 0-3 years and their families in California. Dr. Cortes has provided mental health and behavioral support to families of young children and adolescents in various clinical settings including in-home, outpatient and inpatient treatment programs. She collaborates with in-home visitors, including Tribal home visiting programs, to evaluate interventions and practices used during service delivery and leadership. Throughout her extensive experience, Dr. Cortes continues to work on program design and implementation through professional development and Reflective Practice consultations to support young practitioners entering the field of Early Intervention and leadership. Dr. Cortes supports programs to integrate Reflective Practice in their work setting by fostering supportive, respectful, and professional work environments leading practitioners to experience professional growth. Dr. Cortes is an inaugural member of the California Association of Infant Mental Health and serves as the Clinical Intervention Committee Community of Practices Chair. She is a consultant with WestEd’s IECMHC Consultant Project and serves as a Co-Facilitator of the Division of Early Childhood (DEC) Infant Mental Health Community of Practice (CoP). She completed a Masters of Marriage, Family, and Child Therapy and her PhD in Infant and Early Childhood Development with an emphasis in Infant Mental Health and Developmental Disorders. Her doctoral concentration is in Reflective Practice. She is an Assistant Professor at Riverside Community College in the Early Childhood Department and is currently completing a second Master’s degree in Social Work through USC on the Family, Children, and Youth track. Dr. Cortes has presented at numerous international and national conferences including the World Association of Infant Mental Health (WAIMH) congress, Infant Development Association (IDA), and Division of Early Childhood (DEC) conference.

Tala Ghantous, LCSW is a bilingual, Arabic/English speaking, licensed clinical social worker who lives and works in Oakland, CA, a multicultural town in the San Francisco Bay area.  For the last 20 years, she has specialized in early childhood mental health services offered to families and communities impacted by a multitude of psychosocial stressors impacting early development.   Tala infuses her formal training in the child-parent psychotherapy trauma model, the Facilitated Attuned Interactions (FAN) model for emotional regulation, and the Circle of Security model to strengthen the relationship between children and their caregivers and support the development of young children.  Tala partners with multidisciplinary agencies to help support and integrate a reflective model into their supervisory structures and provides training, consultation, and clinical supervision as well.  Tala uses her experiences as an immigrant and parent and avid reader to help families create their own narratives for healing.   

Linda Gilkerson, Ph.D., LSW is a Professor at Erikson Institute where she directs the graduate and certificate training programs in infancy and infant mental health and is Executive Director of Fussy Baby Network. Linda has combined developing and directing graduate training programs in infancy with designing and leading relationship-based services for parents of infants and providing professional development to the infant/family field. In 1980, while on faculty at Wheelock College, she started Project Welcome in Boston, federally funded model demonstration program to bring developmental care to NICUs and provide support to premature babies and their parents during and after hospitalization. Moving to Chicago, she directed the Infant Care Program at Evanston Hospital for seven years where, with her colleagues, she developed a family administered version of the Brazelton which begins prenatally to engage parents with their new baby and their experience of themselves as parents. She joined the faculty of the Erikson Institute in 1986, where she became director of their infant training programs.

For nearly two decades, Linda led her team at Erikson in developing the Fussy Baby Network, an infant mental health informed prevention program for families with infants with crying, sleeping and feeding challenges. She is the developer of the FAN (Facilitating Attuned Interactions), an approach to family engagement and reflective practice which started in the Fussy Baby Network service program in Chicago. The FAN now is shared widely through a national and international network of FAN training programs and is used in a range of settings including home visitation, infant and early childhood mental health consultation, early intervention, primary health care and child welfare. She was part of the original group at Zero to Three who began to focus the field on reflective supervision and has worked to incorporate reflection into all aspects of her work in professional education and service delivery. The Supervisor FAN blends both administrative and reflective supervision to provide an integrated approach to supervision for the multiple responsibilities that the frontline supervisor holds. Her research and publications focus on relationship-based approaches to intervention and supervision. She was a long-time board member of Zero to Three and led or served on many early childhood task forces in Illinois. She is a grandmother, learning all over what it means to be a parent!

Brenda Jones Harden, PH.D. is the Ruth Harris Ottman, Class of ’45, Professor of Child and Family Welfare, at the Columbia School of Social Work. She directs the Prevention and Early Adversity Research Laboratory, where she and her research team examine the developmental and mental health needs of young children who have experienced early adversity and toxic stress, particularly those who have been maltreated, are in foster care, or have experienced other forms of trauma. A particular focus is preventing maladaptive outcomes in these populations through early childhood programs. She has conducted numerous evaluations of such programs, including early care and education, home visiting services, and parenting interventions. She is currently working on an evaluation of the effectiveness of MD’s Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation program.

Brenda is a scientist-practitioner who uses research to improve the quality and effectiveness of child and family services, especially in the areas of home visiting, infant/early childhood mental health, and child welfare. She has been a trainer and a consultant with various national and local early childhood programs, on mental health issues and reflective supervision. She has been a faculty member of Infant Early Childhood Mental Health programs in DC, MD, and CT and has provided infant/early childhood mental health training to other state and local organizations. She is currently evaluating the effectiveness of MD’s Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation program. She has published widely on the delivery of early childhood mental health services. 

Brenda is currently the President of the Board at Zero to Three, and is a graduate fellow of Zero to Three. She serves on various federal, state, and local advisory boards related to early childhood development, mental health, and preventive programs. She received a PhD in developmental and clinical psychology from Yale University and a Master’s in Social Work from New York University.

Georgette Harrison, EdM, LPC is the Director of Clinical and Community Partnerships for the Child Guidance Center of Southern CT.  In this capacity, she supervises clinicians working with young children and families, collaborates with community stakeholders, and provides individual and dyadic therapy in English and Spanish to Latinx families.  Prior to her tenure at the Child Guidance Center of Southern CT, she served as the Training Director for Child First, a national, evidence-based two-generation model that works with young children and families who have been exposed to toxic stress.  In that role, she helped develop, coordinate and deliver in-person and distance learning trainings for Child First staff in Connecticut, Florida and North Carolina.  Her areas of practice and research interest are the impact of child and caregiver trauma histories on infant and early childhood relationships, as well as how caregiver experiences of good-enough parenting can be accessed and used in the service of healing caregiver-child relationships.  

Ms. Harrison earned her Master of Arts and Master of Education in Counseling Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University, and holds an Infant-Parent Mental Health Post-Graduate Certificate from the University of Massachusetts, Boston.  She is a Licensed Professional Counselor in the state of Connecticut, an internal agency trainer for the Attachment-Regulation-Competency trauma treatment model, a rostered Child-Parent Psychotherapy clinician, an American Psychoanalytic Association Fellow, as well as a Circle of Security Parenting Facilitator.  She also writes a column titled “Good-Enough Parenting” for a local newspaper. 

Mary Claire Heffron, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with an extensive history in the field of infant and early childhood development and mental health. She trained at the Infant Parent Program at UCSF department of psychiatry and has worked at infant mental health and development settings in the San Francisco Bay area including UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland where she directed the Harris Early Childhood Mental Health Training Program, the Fussy Baby Program, a clinical internship program, and the programs extensive local and national consultation and training activities. In 2019-20 Dr. Heffron was a Fulbright Scholar at Babes Bolyai University in Romania. Currently Mary Claire facilitates a community-based training program in Monterey County, participates in the Fussy Baby training network, and serves on the Reflective Supervision Collaborative (RSC) leadership team. Mary Claire has co-authored a widely used reference book and a video series on reflective supervision, and many articles on relational health, intervention, and reflective supervision practice.

Mary Claire is a Zero to Three Graduate Fellow, a founding member of the California Association for Infant Mental Health, a member of the leadership team of the California Center for Infant Family and Early Childhood Mental Health and a member of the Harris Professional Development Network.

Kadija Johnston, LCSW is a licensed clinical social worker who has been a practitioner in the field of infant and early childhood mental health since 1985. She is the past Director of the Infant-Parent Program at the University of California, San Francisco (U.C.S.F.), one of the nation’s longest standing, and the west coast’s first, early childhood mental health programs. Ms. Johnston pioneered the Program’s approach to Mental Health Consultation. The approach she developed serves as a model for other organizations, locally, nationally and internationally. She has disseminated the model through TA and training in 22 states and internationally.

Currently, Ms. Johnston is on faculty at Georgetown University’s Center for Child and Human Development where she is contributing her expertise and experience in early childhood mental health consultation to the SAMHSA supported Center of Excellence in ECMH Consultation and the National Center for Health, Behavioral Health and Safety.

Kadija is active in national organizations involving early childhood mental health, including the Irving B. Harris Foundation Professional Development Network for Training and Diversity in Leadership in the Early Childhood Mental Health Field. She is a founding member of the Reflective Supervision Collaborative and RAINE, a Southwest Human Development sponsored group of national experts advancing practice, policy and research in ECMH Consultation.

Kadija writes and lectures nationally on early childhood mental health consultation.    In addition to numerous articles, she co-authored the book Mental Health Consultation in Child Care: Transforming Relationships With Directors, Staff, and Families.

In the next phase of her journey, Kadija is committed, and devoting energy to instilling equity, diversity and inclusion principles with greater intentionality and more explicitly in her personal and professional practices.

Trudi N. Murch, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, Director of Services for Children with Disabilities. Dr. Murch is Director of Services for Children with Disabilities at Southwest Human Development (SWHD). Department programs include disability services to Head Start classrooms; the Children’s Developmental Center (Early Intervention), Nurse Family Partnership, and the High Risk Pregnancy community nursing NICU follow-up program. She has taken a lead role in development of the Smooth Way Home program, which supports families as they transition home from the NICU.

Trudi has worked with the leadership team at Southwest Human Development (SWHD) to fully implement the Reflective Supervision Model across the agency, which is a large, community-based agency serving approximately 140,000 children and their families.  SWHD offers over 40 comprehensive programs in the areas of child development and mental health; Easterseals disabilities services; early language and literacy; Head Start/Early Head Start; family support and child welfare; and professional development. SWHD employs over 900 staff, and has a strong commitment to assuring that all staff are offered the opportunity to learn about and benefit from Reflective Supervision. The agency is also dedicated to infusing the principles of reflective practice and relationship-based work into administrative processes and structures.

Trudi has had extensive experience in designing and delivering training programs to a wide range of infant and early childhood specialists in the areas of inclusion, early intervention program design, and reflective supervision. She has co-authored a text: Reflective Supervision and Leadership in Infant and Early Childhood Programs, published by the Zero to Three press. She and her colleague, Mary Claire Heffron have produced a set of video vignettes, along with a training manual, entitled: Finding the Words, Finding the Ways: Exploring Reflective Supervision and Facilitation.

Carmen Rosa Noroña, LICSW, MS.Ed., IECMH-E® is the Child Trauma Clinical Services and Training Lead at Child Witness to Violence Project at Boston Medical Center. Ms. Noroña is a Child-Parent Psychotherapy National Trainer, an expert faculty of the Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood Training (DC: 0-5) and one of the developers of the Harris Professional Development Network Diversity Informed Tenets for Work with Infants Children and Families Initiative and of the Boston Medical Center Family Preparedness Plan for Immigrant Families. Her practice and research interests are on the impact of trauma on attachment; the intersection of culture, immigration and trauma; diversity-informed reflective supervision and consultation; and on the implementation and sustainability of evidence-based practice in real world settings. She is a Co-Leader of the Department of Pediatrics Council of Social Justice, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Boston Medical Center. In addition, she serves as core faculty of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network’s (NCTSN) Being Anti-Racist is Central to Trauma-Informed Care Initiative, as a member of the NCTSN Steering Committee, and as a co-chair of the NCTSN Latin American Families Collaborative group. Ms. Noroña has adapted and translated materials for Spanish-speaking families affected by trauma and has also contributed to the literature in infant and early childhood mental health, diversity and immigration (https://diversityinformedtenets.org) and of the Boston Medical Center Family Preparedness Plan for Immigrant Families. Her practice and research interests are on the impact of trauma on attachment; the intersection of culture, immigration and trauma; diversity-informed reflective supervision and consultation; and on the implementation and sustainability of evidence-based practice in real world settings. She is a Co-Leader of the Department of Pediatrics Council of Social Justice, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Boston Medical Center. In addition, she serves as core faculty of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network’s (NCTSN) Being Anti-Racist is Central to Trauma-Informed Care Initiative, as a member of the NCTSN Steering Committee, and as a co-chair of the NCTSN Latin American Families Collaborative group. Carmen has adapted and translated materials for Spanish-speaking families affected by trauma and has also contributed to the literature in infant and early childhood mental health, diversity and immigration.

Abayea Pelt, BSW is the Director of Maternal and Child Health at Community of Hope, a community-based agency with federally qualified health centers and housing programs in Washington, DC. Abayea has a background in social work, public administration, and nonprofit management. In 2017, Abayea provided leadership in implementing the Facilitating Attuned Interactions approach to home visiting at Mary’s Center as part of a federal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting innovation grant awarded to Georgetown University and DC Health. As part of this innovation award, Abayea was given the opportunity to become a Facilitating Attuned Interactions (FAN) trainer. Since that time, Abayea has trained leadership at the Baltimore Health Department within their Maternal Child Health division, as well as many other agencies and programs across the country in using reflective techniques in direct practice with families, as well as in supervision of program staff. In addition to being a FAN trainer, Abayea is also a national Healthy Families America Foundations for Family Support Trainer. Healthy Families America is a leading model of home visiting which uses an infant mental health framework to support child development and has a two generational approach to engage parents who have experienced childhood trauma. Abayea has experience in managing maternal health and early childhood home visiting programs since 2015. Besides these roles, Abayea is a Certified Lactation Counselor and an Infant Massage Parent Educator as well. 

Abayea is a fourth generation native Washingtonian and she currently resides in DC with her husband Paul and her Labrador retriever, Samwise Gamgee.

Diane Reynolds, LMFT, is a trainer, consultant, coach, and facilitator dedicated to advancing trauma- and equity-informed reflective supervision and leadership.  A California Center endorsed Infant-Family Early Childhood Mental Health Specialist and Reflective Practice Facilitator with over 28 years in the field, she created the Mindful Parenting Groups model in 2001. Over two decades, she introduced this relationship-focused parent-infant group model to Early Head Start, the child welfare community, and dually diagnosed moms in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, as well as in Queensland, Australia.

Diane launched Reflective Praxis Consulting in 2017 to support growing need for professional development, organizational consultation, implementation support, and coaching in reflective practice, supervision, and leadership. She has introduced these transformative practices in primary and secondary educational settings, gang intervention, and home visitation programs. During the pandemic, Diane embraced the infinite horizon of virtual training possibilities, delivering hundreds of virtual hours of reflective practice content and experiential process, including grief work, resiliency and wellness activities, liberating structures, as well as poetry and inspiration to support Covid-exhausted hospital-based home visitation teams across Los Angeles County. Diane is currently engaged with the City of Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services to implement reflective supervision and leadership in support of their initiative to build a trauma-informed city.

Supporting the Reflective Supervision Collaborative in various roles since 2018, Diane has provided project management, virtual curriculum development, and design-build services for the RSC online training platform in anticipation of launching a scalable, accessible, virtual reflective supervision training for multi-disciplinary providers in the infant-family early childhood field.

Salam Soliman, Psy.D., IMH-E® is the Director of the Center of Prevention and Early Trauma Treatment at the National Service office for Nurse Family Partnership and Child First.  In that role, she oversees a Category II National Child Traumatic Stress Network Center which include replication of the Child First model, providing evidence-based trainings and consultation services in communities across the US and helping create systems that work to support families and young children.  Prior to that, she had been the Connecticut State Clinical Director and National Clinical Advisor for Child First, Inc. She came to this position after having trained and worked internationally in hospitals, courthouses, public schools, universities, and outpatient clinics. Her work has primarily focused on children, with a particular interest in disrupted attachments and the long-term effects of trauma on children. Dr. Soliman is a licensed clinical psychologist and is also endorsed as an infant mental health mentor. Salam served as an Adjunct Clinical Professor at Pace University and later as the Director for Counseling Services for New York University in Abu Dhabi.

Salam is involved in many national initiatives including the development of a Reflective Supervision Curriculum.  In collaboration with Louisiana State University Health Center and School of Medicine, Salam is also the Coordinator for the NCTSN Disaster and Terrorism Northeast Coalition for Connecticut. She also serves as a Board Member for APA Division 39, Section II and a consultant to the ANCHOR program at KHH Hospital in Singapore.

Barbara Stroud, PhD, is a licensed psychologist with over three decades worth of culturally informed clinical practice in early childhood development and mental health. She is a founding organizer and the inaugural president (2017-2019) of the California Association for Infant Mental Health, a ZERO TO THREE Fellow, and holds prestigious endorsements as an Infant and Family Mental Health Specialist/Reflective Practice Facilitator Mentor. In 2018 Dr. Stroud was honored with the Bruce D. Perry Spirit of the Child Award. Embedded in all of her trainings and consultations are the activities of reflective practice, demonstrating cultural attunement, and holding a social justice lens in the work. Dr. Stroud’s book “How to Measure a Relationship” [published 2012] is improving infant mental health practices around the globe and is now available in Spanish. Her second book, an Amazon best seller, “Intentional Living: finding the inner peace to create successful relationships” walks the reader through a deeper understanding of how their brain influences relationships. Both volumes are currently available on Amazon. Additionally, Dr. Stroud is a contributing author to the text “Infant and early childhood mental health: Core concepts and clinical practice” edited by Kristie Brandt, Bruce Perry, Steve Seligman, & Ed Tronick.

Dr. Stroud received her Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Psychology from Nova Southeastern University, and she has worked largely with children in urban communities with severe emotional disturbance.  Dr. Stroud’s professional career path has allowed her to work across service delivery silos supporting professionals in mental health, early intervention (part c), child welfare, early care and education, family court staff, primary care, and other arenas. She is highly regarded and has been a key player in the inception and implementation of cutting-edge service delivery to children Prenatal to five and their families; her innovative approaches have won national awards. She has held an adjunct faculty position at California State Long Beach, and maintained a faculty position in the Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship for 12 years. Currently, Dr. Stroud’s primary focus is professional training and private consultation from an anti-racist lens, with a focus on social justice, in the field of infant mental health. Dr. Stroud remains steadfast in her mission to ‘changing the world – one relationship at a time’.

To learn more visit: http://www.DrBarbaraStroud.com.

Christopher Watson, Ph.D., IMH-E® is the Founding Director of the Reflective Practice Center at the University of Minnesota. His work is centered on reflective supervision and reflective practice to support all those who work with infants and young children and their families. He led a national team of researchers and clinicians who are members of the international Alliance for the Advancement of Infant Mental Health in developing the Reflective Interaction Observation Scale (RIOS) to define and operationalize reflective supervision. The RIOS is used as a framework for practice as well as a research tool. Dr. Watson was principal investigator for an evaluation of Minnesota’s Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) project focused on developing statewide capacity in reflective practice.

Christopher and Martha Farrell Erickson, PhD, co-founded the interdisciplinary, post-baccalaureate Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Certificate Program at the University of Minnesota. He was director of the Minnesota Infant Mental Health Project and conducted the Minnesota Infant Mental Health Feasibility Study, interagency initiatives funded by the Minnesota Departments of Education, Health, and Human Services. He is endorsed in Infant Mental Health (IMH-[E]) by the Minnesota Association for Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health and is a certified Program for Infant Toddler Care (PITC) trainer.

Christopher has co-written training-of-trainer curricula, including PITC (Program for Infant Toddler Care) as a Curriculum, Talking Reasonably and Responsibly About Brain Development, and Violence Prevention and Intervention in Early Childhood. In addition, he has developed face-to-face and online training courses for early childhood professionals, including Supporting Stressed Young Children Through Relationship-Based Teaching and Bridging Education and Mental Health (BEAM). The BEAM framework combines behavioral and therapeutic approaches to addressing early childhood social-emotional development, mental health, and challenging behaviors.

Prior to his work at the University of Minnesota, Christopher was director of the California Education Innovation Institute, a statewide training program for educators and administrators based at California State University Sacramento.

Deborah J. Weatherston, Ph.D., IMH-E® is currently an infant mental health supervisor and consultant in private practice in Michigan.  She co-developed and served as the first Executive Director of the Alliance for the Advancement of Infant Mental Health, Inc.®., a nationally and internationally recognized organization whose mission is to promote work force development through the competency-based Endorsement for Culturally Sensitive, Relationship-Focused Practice Promoting Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health (2016-2018).  Before that, she was the Executive Director of the Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health (2002-2016). She earned her graduate degrees from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where she co-developed and directed the specialized, interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate Program in Infant Mental Health through the Merrill-Palmer Institute, Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan (1988-2002).

Deborah has contributed to the infant mental health field with co-edited and co-authored books about infant mental health principles and practices: Infant Mental Health Services Supporting Competencies/Reducing Risks (1989/2002/2015) with Betty Tableman and Case Studies in Infant Mental Health: Risk, Resiliency & Relationships (2002) with Joan Shirilla. In 2009 and again in 2016, she co-edited with Dr. Joy Osofsky two special issues of the Infant Mental Health Journal that focused on Infant Mental Health practice, training, reflective supervision, and research.  She has published articles in the Infant Mental Health Journal and the Journal for Zero to Three about practice and reflective supervision, among them: Reflective Supervision: Supporting Reflection as a Cornerstone for Competency (2010) with Bob and Barbra Weigand, Critical Components of Reflective Supervision: Responses from Expert Supervisors in the Field (2014) with Angie Tomlin and Tom Pavkov, and The Michigan Infant Mental Health Home Visiting Model (2020) with Julie Ribaudo and the Michigan Research Collaborative.

Deborah is a ZERO to THREE Graduate Fellow (1999-2000), a consulting editor for the Infant Mental Health Journal, past At-Large Board Member of the World Association for Infant Mental Health (WAIMH) (2012-2016) and served as Editor of WAIMH Perspectives in Infant Mental Health from 2012-2018.