Christina Bethell, PhD, MBA, MPH, Director, Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI) 

Christina Bethell, PhD, MBA, MPH, is a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Medicine. Her research focuses on building and translating the science of healthy development of children, youth, families, and communities. With roots in national and state health care policy, financing reform, and delivery system redesign, Dr. Bethell is the founding director of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI) which, since 1996, has worked to promote the early and lifelong health of children, youth, and families through family-centered data, tools, and research. She has developed and advanced an array of child and family health measures to address the social and relational roots of well-being and the quality of health care systems and structures that influence well-being, including nationally and internationally used measures of the family-centered medical home, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), positive childhood experiences, family resilience, child flourishing, and the Whole Child Risk Index. Her research has led to the development of the national Prioritizing Possibilities agenda to prevent and address ACEs and promote child health equity, providing testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform on identifying, preventing, and treating childhood trauma, informing the American Academy of Pediatrics relational health policy statement and the design of the Engagement In Action (EnAct!) Framework to catalyze statewide integrated relational systems of care. She earned an MBA and an MPH from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in public policy and health services research and policy from the University of Chicago. 

Barbara Leach, Family Support Specialist, UNC School of Social Work

Barbara Leach is a family support specialist and special projects coordinator with the Family Support Program at the UNC School of Social Work. She has more than 30 years of personal and professional experience advocating for families with children who have intellectual/developmental disabilities and other special needs. She served as project coordinator for two successful Family Support 360 Projects of National Significance, which were funded by the U.S. Administration on Developmental Disabilities. A key component of these projects was the use of a “family navigator” to assist families to identify family-driven goals, develop plans, and support families in goal achievement. In addition, family navigators facilitated access to formal and informal services and resources and modeled skills needed for individual and family advocacy and empowerment. Barbara played a key role in developing the family navigator role and job description that the Family Support 360 Projects used across the country. She is the recipient of the 2019 Excellence in Community Engagement Award.

Louis Appel, MD, MPH, Director of Pediatrics, People’s Community Clinic

Louis Appel, MD, MPH, serves as director of pediatrics at People’s Community Clinic in Austin, Texas. Dr. Appel provides primary pediatric care at the clinic in addition to overseeing the clinical programs. At the clinic, he has championed the promotion of early relational health and projects on group pediatric well-child checks, postpartum depression screening, lactation support, and childhood obesity prevention focused on the prenatal and immediate postpartum periods. He is a member of the Harvard Center on the Developing Child’s Pediatric Innovation Initiative working to develop a panel of biomarkers of chronic stress activation in children. He is the immediate past president of the Texas Pediatric Society. In the past he also has served as the Community Access to Child Health (CATCH) program facilitator for District VII of the American Academy of Pediatrics. A graduate of Princeton University, Dr. Appel received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and obtained his MPH at the Harvard School of Public Health, with a concentration in public management and community health. He completed his pediatric residency at the University of Washington in Seattle.