Doctoral Student Panel and Luncheon: Covering All the Bases: Milestones, Mentoring, and Mental Health

Please join us for food and conversation. This year’s doctoral student panel will include a discussion of doctoral program milestones, advisor- student mentor relationships and how to stay sane in a PhD program. Our first speaker, Tamika D. Gilreath is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University in 2007 and completed a NIDA-funded postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University School of Medicine in 2009. Dr. Gilreath studies the patterns of co-occurrence of behavioral health indicators (e.g., substance use, sexual risk, mental health) of vulnerable school-based adolescent populations in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa. Overall, her work contributes to our understanding of the epidemiology and correlates of differential behavioral health outcomes by race, ethnicity and other social identities using latent variable modeling. Our next speaker, Sydney Hans, research focuses on early child development and parenting under conditions of poverty and social risk.  She has conducted a variety of studies on how parent substance use and parent mental illness impact children’s development and the relationships between children and parents. She is currently involved in the design and evaluation of an intervention that utilizes community doulas to provide health education and social support for adolescent parents.  Our final speaker, Bethany Lee is an Associate Professor and the Associate Dean for Research at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. She completed her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. Her research interests include improving the quality of services provided to youth with child welfare involvement and mental health needs. She teaches courses on research and methods to MSW and PhD students.