AC21 - IIH - Part 1: Holding the World’s Youngest Children in Mind: New Models of Support and Reflection for Those on the Humanitarian Frontlines Providing Early Childhood Psychosocial Services

Campbell Paul is a consultant infant psychiatrist at the Royal Children's Hospital and the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. At the invitation of the offices of Perspectives in Infant Mental Health, Campbell shares some of his interests in and entry into the field of infant mental health and acknowledges the importance of WAIMH in bringing together so many enthusiastic, talented clinicians and researchers, each committed to the welfare of infants and their parents. In his own words; It's always said that infant mental health conferences are ones where there is remarkable collegiality and mutual support. I guess, when you consider who are our founders and mentors, that's not surprising. Maree Foley in an earlier edition of Perspectives referred to the inimitable and inspirational Dan Stern who taught us so much about babies' capacities, passions and their relationships.

Lucy Bassett is an expert in children, caregivers, and communities in humanitarian and development contexts. Over her fifteen-year career, Bassett has worked with governments in low- and middle-income countries to expand access to quality education, nutrition and social protection services, particularly for poor and marginalized children and families. Before joining the Batten School, Bassett spent ten years as an education and social protection specialist with the World Bank. Her practitioners' perspective is further grounded by previous work at UNICEF, the World Food Programme, Save the Children, the International Food Policy Research Institute and Peace Corps. She is currently leading research on how to best support young children's development and learning in humanitarian contexts as well as how to support migrant children and families coming to the US/Mexico border. Bassett has expertise in designing and evaluating programs to improve nutrition, food security and early childhood development outcomes. She has worked on projects to increase preschool participation of Roma children in Serbia, provide cash transfers and nutrition services to poor Honduran families and improve social service delivery after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Bassett's work in education focuses on improving quality at the pre-primary and primary levels, and she contributed to the development of a global measurement tool to assess children's learning and development outcomes and learning environment quality.

Astrid Berg is a Psychiatrist, Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist as well as a Jungian Analyst. She is an Emerita A/Professor at the University of Cape Town and A/Professor Extraordinary at the Stellenbosch University. She is the founder of the Western Cape Association for Infant Mental Health and was for 18 years the lead consultant at the University of Cape Town's Parent-Infant Mental Health Service. For five years she served on the Health Sciences Committee of the National Research Foundation of South Africa. She currently consults to and teaches at two University affiliated hospitals and is co-convenor of the newly established M Phil degree in Infant Mental Health at Stellenbosch University. She supervises PhD and Masters' Degrees in Infant Mental Health and is on the Executive Committee of the World Association for Infant Mental Health.

Erum Mariam is the Executive Director of BRAC IED (The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee Institute of Educational Development), BRAC University, in Bangladesh. She has extensive experience of scaling up education interventions and was involved in the expansion of BRAC's non-formal primary schools in the 1990s.