CL22 - II-A3: Vital Signs of Early Relational Health: Advancing Emotional Connections Through Reach Out and Read

David Willis, MD, FAAP, serves as a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP), is the founder of Nurture Connection, and is a national expert in pediatrics, early childhood systems, and early relational health. Dr. Willis is also a member of the ECDHS: Evidence to Impact Center’s National Advisory Board.  

Nikki Shearman, PhD is responsible for guiding the planning process to build out Reach Out and Read’s strategic road map, Next Chapter, and for taking the lead in implementing the plan around Reach Out and Read’s leadership role in shaping pediatric primary care to promote nurturing family-child relationships. As Chief of Strategic Initiatives, she leads the organizational strategy to continue development of the program through strategic initiatives, and works closely with medical leadership to offer training and skill-building opportunities for clinicians implementing the Reach Out and Read program. She also coordinates the strategy for research and evaluation that demonstrates Reach Out and Read’s impact. Nikki brings a combined experience of research, operational strategy, and communications to this position, starting with 10 years’ experience in medical research in laboratories in the UK, Japan and Germany, and publication of her work in international journals. Subsequently, Shearman has worked within the management of a variety of non-profit organizations in the UK and the US. Shearman earned her Ph.D in cancer research from the University of Southampton, UK.

Dani Dumitriu, MD, PhD, is a pediatrician and neuroscientist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. She completed her physician-scientist training, pediatric residency, and a pediatric environmental health fellowship at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and was the first female to secure R01-level independent funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during clinical training.  She currently spends 20% time as a hospitalist in the Well Baby Nursery and 80% time conducting research into the mechanisms of emotional connection and resilience across species and investigational scales in her dual roles as Principal Investigator of the Developmental Origins of Resilience (DOOR) lab and Director of the Nurture Science Program. Her most recent research in animal models seeks to understand neuroconnectomic differences between stress-susceptible and stress-resilient mice, with a focus on pre-stress patterns in inbred mice housed in homogenous conditions. In a recent publication, her team identified both structural and functional differences in the prefrontal cortex to amygdala circuit mediating trait susceptibility to an acute social defeat stressor. Her most recent research in humans focuses on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the generation born during these uncertain and changing times, and she is the founder and Chair of Columbia University's COVID-19 Mother Baby Outcomes (COMBO) Initiative. In a recent publication, her team showed that in utero exposure to the pandemic environment, but not to maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy, leads to small but significant decrements in motor and social skills at 6 months of age. In a different publication, the team also showed that postnatal maternal COVID-related stress is associated with more negative temperament in 6-month-olds. The COMBO team is currently putting together data on early relational health (ERH) and socioemotional functioning of these infants. Preliminary findings using the Welch Emotional Connection Screen (WECS), the ERH scale that will be the focus of the interactive session through which Dr. Dumitriu and co-presenters Drs. Davis Willis (Center for Study of Social Policy) and Nikki Shearman (Reach Out and Read) will guide attendees at ZERO TO THREE LEARN Conference 2022, shows lower rates of emotionally connected mother-infant dyads than in prior work published by WECS co-creators Drs. Martha Welch and Amie Hane in prepandemic times from similar cohorts.