StAT Alumni Residents

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StAT Residents & Alumni Spotlight

Class of 2023

Dora Alvarez

Previously: University of California San Francisco

Project Description: Dora partnered with Dr. Baraka Floyd in her project to elicit caregivers’ perspectives on positive childhood experiences and how providers can best communicate about these experiences. Her project focused on determining what one group of parents thinks about this topic, how it relates to their uptake of resources, and any suggestions they would make to providers in approaching these sensitive issues. Although this only reflects a specific clinic’s patient population, we hope it will be a starting point for further research.  

Alaina Butler

Previously: University of Washington

Project Description: Alaina partnered with Brighter Beginnings. The purpose of this project was to understand the short-term effects of screening for adverse childhood experiences at Brighter Beginnings, an organization with primary care clinics in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. The first goal of this project was to implement a screening program for adverse childhood experiences at Brighter Beginnings for each well child greater than three years of age, then employ surveys to better understand how ACEs screening is being conducted at Brighter Beginnings as well as patient/parent opinions of ACEs screening, perceived benefits or positive outcomes, and perceived drawbacks. The results of the surveys will be shared with Brighter Beginnings to improve internal processes and with a broader audience of other primary care clinics who are initiating ACEs screening.  

Aydin Zahedivash

Previously: University of Texas

Project Description: Aydin partnered with The Primary School. The goal of this project is to quantify the consequences of our fragmented screening and treatment system for children with social, emotional, and language support needs, and to help inform broader policy efforts to standardize support for families. Among the most potent motivators of policy change are the financial consequences of ineffective social systems, and we hope to use our modeling to highlight the costs of our current system and propose methods for financially sustainable, equitable early childhood interventions.

Chrysa Cheronis

Previously: Rosalind Franklin University

Project description: Chrysa partnered with members of the Asylum Latino Initiative (ALI) / Latinx Family Resource Program (LFRP) at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. The goal of this project is to improve access to care for asylum seeking patients and their families presenting to LPCH and activating the Inpatient Asylum Protocol (IAP). This protocol has been active since 2019, and we now are able to perform a retrospective chart review of this patient population and to conduct a mixed methods analysis describing the patient demographics, their medical and social needs, as well as the interventions of the protocol.

Susanna Jain

Previously: Oakland University

Project description: Susanna partnered with The Primary School to educate general pediatricians about the negative effects on health and wellbeing associated with school exclusion in childhood. The goal of the project is to advance community health by offering practical solutions for general pediatricians and local education agencies to reduce exclusionary school discipline, which will reduce the negative effects of these practices on the health of preschool and school-aged children.  

Kleshie Baisie

Previously: University of California, Riverside

Project description: Kleshie partnered with San Mateo County WIC. The goal of the project is to explore the barriers to referral from Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH) to San Mateo County WIC, and to ensure that at least 50% of mothers who are eligible for WIC in the LPCH Well-Baby Nursery (WBN) and Packard Intermediate Care Nursery (PICN), are referred to San Mateo County WIC within a 6-month trial of the intervention.

Zara Quader

Previously: Rosalind Franklin University

Project description: Zara partnered with James Ranch, and Fresh Lifelines for Youth. The project objective was to create and introduce a peer health education pilot within the juvenile justice system based on health topics important to the youth in order to offer evidence-based, peer-to-peer education informed by an adolescent development framework, to promote health practices during and after detention and develop the leadership and public speaking skills of the youth who are peer educators. 

Laura Rose

Previously: University of California, Irvine

Program description: Laura partnered with Ronald McDonald House Charities Bay Area. The project obective was to assess the childcare needs for healthy siblings at RMHC, in order to assist RMHC in their effort to strengthen and expand current sibling support services.  

Meghan Schmitt

Previously: University of Illinois

Program description: Meghan partnered with the Ronald McDonald House Charities Meal Program. The purpose of this project is to assess the degree of food insecurity among families of hospitalized children in the bay area. The study had three main goals: 1) To assess the prevalence of food insecurity and the barriers to access among families of hospitalized children in the bay area. 2) To assess how the Ronald McDonald House Charities Meal Program is addressing food insecurity in this population, what barriers to access exist for this program, and what additional resources would be helpful to further address this issue. 3) To disseminate findings to our community partner and within our larger community in order to determine how Ronald McDonald House Charities resources should be prioritized in the future.