Infant-Parent Mental Health Post-Graduate Certificate Program

Faculty Chief, Director & Core Faculty

Faculty Chief

Ed Tronick
Ed Tronick is a developmental and clinical psychologist and is recognized internationally as a researcher on infants, children and parenting. Dr. Tronick is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is Director of the Child Development Unit at Children’s Hospital, a Lecturer in Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School and an Associate Professor at both the Graduate School of Education and the School of Public Health at Harvard. He is a faculty member at the Fielding Graduate Institute, a member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a past member of Dan Stern’s Boston Process of Change Group. With Dr. Kristie Brandt, he is co-director of the Napa Parent-Infant Mental Health Fellowship Program and he is a faculty member of the Touchpoints program. He consults for Dalmatian Press’s educational books and other entities. He has worked with Dr. TB Brazelton on mother-infant face to face interaction, Newborn Assessment Scale and the Touchpoints Project. Dr. Tronick developed the Still-face paradigm and with Barry Lester the NICU Network Neurobehavioral Assessment Scale. He continues to do research on the effects of maternal depression and other affective disorders on infant and child social emotional development. His current research focuses on infant memory for stress. He has published more than 200 scientific articles and 4 books, several hundred photographs and appeared on national radio and television programs. His research has been funded by NIDA, NICHD, NIMH, NSF and the McArthur Foundation. He has also served as permanent member of an NIMH review panel, and reviews for the National Science Foundations of Canada, the US and Switzerland. Dr. Tronick has presented his work to analytic societies including Berlin, Milan, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rome, Pittsburg, NYC, St. Louis, Kansas City and to societies and congresses including the N.Y. Academy of Science, the Society for Research in Child Development, the Marce’ Society, the American Psychoanalytic Meetings, and numerous universities in the US and abroad.

Program Director

Dorothy Richardson, Ph.D.
Dr. Richardson is a clinical psychologist and the founding Director of The Rice Center for Young Children and Families, an Infant-Parent Mental Health Clinic at the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy in Brookline, Mass, where she trains and supervises a staff of psychologists and social workers to provide parent-infant psychotherapy to families with children ages birth to five. She also serves as an early childhood mental health consultant to early childcare centers and has developed and led numerous parenting workshops and teacher trainings. Dr. Richardson has served on a number of state advisory committees on Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health, presently serving on the executive committee of the newly formed MassAIMH, Birth to Six, (Massachusetts Association for Infant Mental Health).

Core Faculty

Throughout the program, a variety of nationally and internationally recognized experts in the field of Infant-Parent Mental Health will be scheduled to join the Fellows and provide training, engage in dialogue, and participate in a case discussion related to their area of expertise and research. Faculty have been carefully selected to provide learners with the opportunity to meet and think with experts and luminaries in the field that have a wide range of disciplines, academic and clinical backgrounds, research expertise, and theoretical approaches. The 2009-2010 IPMHPCP core faculty are:

  • Kristie Brandt, C.N.M., D.N.P.
    Dr. Kristie Brandt is the Director of the Parent-Infant & Child Institute in Napa, California and Director of the Napa Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship Program. She is also a consultant providing training, program development services, and evaluation around the country, and and she is a Child Trauma Academy teaching Fellow. She was Chief Public Health Manager for Napa County Public Health and retired in January 2007 after nearly 25 years overseeing MCH and other public health services. In that position, she developed and oversaw the Therapeutic Child Care Center, the first such full-day, full-year center of its kind in the country for high-risk children with parents in recovery, mental health, CPS, and CalWORKs services with the county. The TCCC opened in 2001 and immediately received international acclaim, and won state and national awards of excellent. From 1996-2005, she developed, implemented and conducted research on the Touchpoints nurse home visiting project, and she has provided consultation for home visiting programs nationwide, including assisting with the 2002 launch of Santa Barbara’s WEB home visiting project, the model for the Napa Valley’s program that launched in 2004. She has experience in assessing infants and parents using a range of modalities including videotaped encounters, and in the early 1990’s, she studied the association of breastfeeding duration to maternal-infant interaction, attachment behaviors, and other variables in the first week after birth. She has studied factors influencing maternal prenatal infant feeding decisions, and contributed to a national familial breast and ovarian cancer research project. Her special interest is in parent-child interaction and understanding, as a primary public health concern, the lifelong implications of early care and relationships on the health and well-being of the child, the parent, and the community, and in understanding the impact of the environmental in self and mutual regulation. In 2002, she co-developed the Infant-Parent Mental Post-Graduate Certificate Program (IPMHPCP) curriculum with Dr. Ed Tronick, a state and national award winning and innovative training approach for graduate through post-doctoral working professionals. She was the program director, a faculty member, and a graduate of the inaugural 2003-2004 IPMHPCP in Napa, CA, and has been the program director and a faculty member for the 2006-2007, 2008-2009, and the current 2009-2010 IPMHPCP Napa cohorts. She is the Napa Valley Touchpoints site coordinator, an NCAST instructor, and works in a private Ob/Gyn practice. Dr. Brandt is a board certified nurse-midwife licensed since 1984, a nurse practitioner since 1981, and holds a California Public Health Nursing certificate. She earned both her Master’s and a Doctorate in nursing at Case Western Reserve University.
  • Marilyn Davillier, LICSW, Associate Program Director
    Marilyn R. Davillier, a Licensed Clinical Social worker, has worked with infants, children and families in a teaching, research or clinical capacity for over 20 years. Her early career was as a Montessori pre-school teacher. In her research experience in behavioral pediatrics, she worked extensively with the psychological tools and measures relevant to infant and child development and co-authored several papers on the developmental outcomes of preterm and drug exposed infants. As a clinician she works with families and children of all ages finding the use of videotape and Sandplay Therapy to be highly effective therapeutic tools as an adjunct to traditional art or play therapies. She is trained in the Brazelton Touchpoints Model of family practice, Downing’s Video Microanalytic Therapy technique, Sandplay Therapy, and has extensively trained as a Parent-Infant Mental Health practitioner. She is currently in private practice with a special focus on the treatment of the disorders of infancy and early childhood and parent-child relationship problems as well as a staff clinician at the Rice Center for Young Children and Families at the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy. Her theoretical orientation is strongly anchored in Dynamic Systems Theory and Tronick’s Dyadic Expansion of Consciousness Model; her approach to treatment is relational and psychodynamic with a mind-body emphasis.
  • Alexandra Harrison, MD
  • Dorothy Richardson, Ph.D.
  • Ed Tronick, Ph.D.

And guest faculty include:

  • Beatrice Beebe, Ph.D.
  • Alice Carter, Ph.D.
  • Lee Cohen, MD
  • George Downing, Ph.D.
  • Peter Fonagy, Ph.D.
  • Jane Koomar, Ph.D., OTL/R
  • Barry Lester, Ph.D.
  • Alicia Lieberman, Ph.D.
  • Joy Osofsky, Ph.D.
  • Joyce Pavao, Ph.D.
  • Bruce Perry, MD, Ph.D.
  • Dan Siegel, MD, Ph.D.
  • Jayne Singer, Ph.D.
  • Gerald Stechler, Ph.D.
  • Jean Twomey, Ph.D.