Join us for this 6-part series exploring implementation science, its methodology, and application. Local and national experts will share talks on de-implementation, implementation mechanisms, community engagement, health equity, dissemination strategies, and global implementation science.

Tuesday, December 6, 2022:

Alethea Desrosiers, PhD: “Applying Implementation Science to Address the Global Mental Health Treatment Gap”

Mental health disorders are the second largest contributor to the global burden of disease among youth and adults. This burden is compounded in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) and other low resource settings due to the widening mental health treatment gap, which is particularly pronounced in LMICs with histories of violence and loss. While many promising evidence-based mental interventions have been implemented in LMICs, their reach and sustainability are often limited. Applying an Implementation science lens to global mental health research and practice has the potential to better address the significant gaps in mental health service access in LMICs by designing for implementation and sustainment earlier in the process. This talk will discuss how implementation science processes and approaches can be applied to improve the adoption, reach and sustainment of evidence-based mental health interventions among vulnerable populations of youth residing in LMICs, with case examples from Sierra Leone and Colombia.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Alethea Desrosiers is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University. Her work focuses on implementation science in the global mental health context. Dr. Desrosiers is the PI of a newly funded National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) R01 hybrid implementation-effectiveness trial to investigate implementation of an evidence-based mental health intervention delivered by teachers in Sierra Leone’s secondary schools, and a Hilton Foundation award to culturally adapt and pilot test an evidence-based mental health intervention delivered within entrepreneurship training to forcibly displaced Colombian and Venezuelan migrant youth in Colombia. She also leads a NIMH R21 study, applying user-centered design to develop Mobile Health tools to improve delivery quality of a family home visiting intervention delivered by community health workers in Sierra Leone.

We are pleased to announce our Virtual Panel on Careers Outside Academia. Two amazing Brown graduates will be joining us:

Dr. Daniel Ullman (CLPS): UX Researcher, Meta Reality Labs
Danny Ullman is a UX Researcher at Meta Reality Labs. He works on privacy research for Augmented Reality (AR) and wearable products, like Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses. His research centered on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in the Yale Social Robotics Lab and the Brown Social Cognitive Science Research Lab, with a focus on human-robot trust for his dissertation. Together with his graduate advisor Bertram F. Malle, he developed the Multi-Dimensional Measure of Trust (MDMT)—a model and measure of trust applicable to robot agents and agents more generally. His graduate research was conducted under the Brown University Humanity-Centered Robotics Initiative (HCRI).

Dr. Rahilla Tarfa (GPP): M.D. Student
Dr. Rahilla Tarfa is a first-year resident in otolaryngology at the University of Washington. In 2017, Dr. Tarfa completed her Ph.D. in the lab of Dr. Zayd Khalliq at NINDS, NIH, where she studied the excitability properties of midbrain dopamine neuron subpopulations. She earned her M.D. through the University of Pittsburgh MSTP in 2022.

The format will be similar to the previous panels, where you will have the opportunity to hear a bit of background from the speakers and then ask questions. Zoom information is below.

Feel free to reach out with any comments or questions!

We are excited to host two Brown Graduate School alumni who work in the field of intellectual property (IP) and patent law. Our guests, Dr. Diana Borgas, a patent agent, and Dr. Nathan Martin, a technology specialist, are both employed at Wolf, Greenfield, and Sacks, one of the top 10 law firms in the country, devoted to IP and patent law. Expect a brief presentation followed by a Q&A session. The seminar will be followed by a causal, in-person reception.

RSVP Form: https://forms.gle/pQFr5ry8MMZwscwx7

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.

Speaker: Meghan Willcoxon, CLPS PhD student, Brown University

Title: Effects of attention and task-relevance in crowd following

Abstract: Models of collective motion in human crowds tend to predict averaging behavior; that is, pedestrians will align their direction of travel (heading) to that of the crowd mean. However, when following a group of friends in a crowd, anecdotal evidence suggests that we can easily attend to, track, and follow our friends. In other words, the heading of other neighbors in the crowd does not influence our own heading when we choose to walk with our friends. This suggests that we can entirely segment a subgroup of neighbors and ignore the rest of the crowd. However, the exact mechanisms of such segmentation are unknown: What is the role of attention when we follow our friends? Is spontaneous averaging impervious to attentional control? Do we group neighbors to facilitate tracking ease? To investigate these questions, we employed a modified multiple-object tracking paradigm in virtual crowds and found that while the compulsion to follow the crowd mean is robust, attention to familiar neighbors (friends) biases pedestrian locomotion spontaneously.

This is a drop-in session where CCV staff members will be available to answer questions about Brown’s research computing resources (Oscar, Stronghold, Globus) and help with any high-performance computing (HPC) issues you might have.

Speaker: Lakshmi Narasimhan Govindarajan, Brown University

Title: Attractor Dynamics in Large Scale Recurrent Neural Networks

Advisor: Professor Thomas Serre

~ zoom link information to the meeting sent to clps all ~

If you are not part of the CLPS Department and would like to attend, please contact the department’s graduate student coordinator at least 24 hours in advance.

Carney Conversation: The LINE AD Study

Register Here

Join Carney’s Director Diane Lipscombe and Associate Director Chris Moore for a Carney Conversation with John Sedivy, associate dean and director of the University’s Center for the Biology of Aging, and Meghan Riddle, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior. They’ll explore the promising new LINE AD study which is investigating the efficacy of using nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, traditionally employed to treat HIV, to decrease age-related inflammation in the brain due to Alzheimer’s disease.

This is a drop-in session where CCV staff members will be available to answer questions about Brown’s research computing resources (Oscar, Stronghold, Globus) and help with any high-performance computing (HPC) issues you might have.

Join us for the Carney Institute Holiday Party, featuring a cookie decorating station!

Please RSVP below.

Talk Title: Sparse Deep Learning

Abstract: Sparsity is popular in statistics and machine learning, because it can avoid overfitting, speed up computations, and facilitate interpretations. In deep learning, however, the full potential of sparsity still needs to be explored. This presentation first recaps sparsity in the framework of high-dimensional statistics and then introduces sparsity-inducing methods and corresponding theory for modern deep-learning pipelines.