Brain development/Law/Policy Brown School School of Medicine

New child maltreatment research center launched with $6.5 million NIH grant

Multidisciplinary center includes Constantino’s research on newborns

From the WashU Newsroom

Melissa Jonson-Reid, the Ralph and Muriel Pumphrey Professor of Social Work Research at the Brown School, and her team, including faculty from several disciplines across Washington University in St. Louis and Saint Louis University, have received a five-year, $6,496,050 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create The Center for Innovation in Child Maltreatment Policy Research and Training (CICM).

“Child abuse and neglect is a widespread and complex problem, linked to a number of negative downstream outcomes and incurring substantial costs across individual, family and societal levels,” Jonson-Reid said.

“CICM will assemble an extraordinary group of more than 40 researchers and experts from multiple disciplines and major research universities and organizations across the country,” Jonson-Reid said, “dedicated to advancing transdisciplinary science and innovative dissemination and training approaches to prevent child maltreatment and promote healthy development among victims of abuse and neglect.”

  • Identification of Newborns at High Risk for the Occurrence of Preventable Child Maltreatment, led by John Constantino, the Blanche F. Ittleson Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics and director of the William Greenleaf Eliot Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. “This project builds on the division’s Perinatal Behavioral Health Service — an extensive program of mental health support for new mothers embedded in the Obstetrics and Newborn Medicine Services of Barnes Jewish Hospital and St. Louis Children’s Hospital,” Constantino said. “The study will implement long-term support strategies to prevent child abuse, initiated within the health system during the first days of a baby’s life.”

  Read more at the Source.