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Featured Speakers
Shana & Joshua have over 3 years experience of being micro-preemie parent advocates. They also have over 12 years of being preemie advocates as well. Shana and Joshua are parents to 1 micropreemie (Abel) and 3 preemies (Olivia, Stella, and Jackson). Their mission is to provide hope to parents struggling with high-risk pregnancies, encourage expectant mothers to educate themselves, provide families of premature babies a realistic look at what lies ahead in their Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) journey, and show that miracles can happen, and faith and hope can turn into joy.
Dr. Byatt is a Tenured Professor at UMass Chan Medical School, perinatal psychiatrist, and physician-scientist focused on improving systems of care to promote the mental health of parents and children. She developed the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program (MCPAP) for Moms MCPAP for Moms, now a national model for perinatal mental health care. She is the Founding Executive Director of the Lifeline for Families Center and Lifeline for Moms Program at UMass Chan Medical School. Her research uses implementation science methods to design, implement, and evaluate scalable approaches for improving parental and child mental health services and outcomes. With over ten years of federal funding, her research had led to over 100 peer-reviewed publications.
Julie is currently the Nurse Director in the NICU at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). Her nursing career started in 2005 as a medical-surgical nurse and after two years, she moved to the NICU. After thirteen years, she transitioned into a leadership role as the Professional Development Manager (PDM) where she advocated for evidence-based practices, implemented care enhancements, and promoted bedside nursing excellence. Julie transitioned into a temporary director role in addition to her PDM role in 2021 and has officially led the team as director since Fall 2022. As a leader within the largest NICU in Massachusetts (MA), Julie works collaboratively to promote optimal nursing care as a key component of the multidisciplinary team overseeing the medical needs of neonates and their families.
Karissa is a 35 year old wife and mother of two who grew up in Lynn, MA and currently resides in Gloucester, MA. She attended Bunker Hill Community College for nursing and has had past careers working as a full-time patient care assistant (PCA) and then eventually moving on to becoming an emergency medical technician (EMT). Her interests include healthcare, giving back to her community, and being proactive in anything that contributes to helping others. She always strives to be the best version of herself and can say, with confidence, that her greatest achievement in life thus far is simply being the best mother that she can be for her children.
Sharon Dekel, PhD is Associate Professor of Psychology in the Psychiatry Department at Harvard Medical School and Founding Director of the Postpartum Traumatic Stress Disorders Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is recognized nationally and internationally for her scientific work on childbirth-related posttraumatic stress disorder (CB-PTSD). Dr. Dekel’s research, supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), brings together clinical and developmental psychology, psychophysiology, neuroscience, and computational models to develop novel tools for the early identification and treatment of women at risk for postpartum psychopathology following traumatic experiences of childbirth. She leads large-scale clinical investigations and translational studies that aim to reveal the psychological and biological signature of CB-PTSD and co-morbid maternal-to-infant bonding impairment.
Dr. Flanigan is a neonatologist currently serving as Chief of Clinical Operations for the Department of Pediatrics at BWH. She did her medical training at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland and her residency and Fellowship at Walter Reed Army Medical Center/National Naval Medical Center. She did a post-doctoral fellowship at National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Prevention Research. She spent 14 years as an active-duty Army Medical Corps Officer as a neonatologist. She holds an MPH from Tulane University and an MBA from MIT. Her specific interests are caring for extremely low birth weight and peri-viable infants, improving parent counseling and shared decision making, and improving team dynamics and guidelines to improve outcomes.
Dr. Healy is a neonatologist at Beth Israel Lahey Health, where she is a member of the clinical leadership team. Her work is focused on the care of extremely low birth weight infants, infants born before 24 weeks gestation, and neonatal respiratory management. Dr. Healy has led the NeoQIC Respiratory Care Collaborative, which includes multidisciplinary teams from across New England, since 2019. When not at work, Dr. Healy spends the rest of her time with her husband and two young children.
Dr. Khoury (she/her) is a Palestinian physician and public health activist born and raised in East Jerusalem. She moved to the US for OBGYN medical training, then in 2014 fulfilled a lifelong dream by joining MSF (Doctors Without Borders) and has since completed 6 surgical assignments in Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Côte D'Ivoire, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Dr. Khoury returned to the US to complete a fellowship in Maternal Fetal Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center, then joined the faculty at BU/BMC. Her clinical work and advocacy are rooted in reproductive justice and she primarily works at the intersection of high-risk obstetrics and safe abortion care. She has been on the MSF-USA Board of Directors since 2019, working to uplift and amplify the voices of patients and global staff in the MSF movement. In 2024, she was elected president of MSF-USA.
Zhandra is a national public health expert and thought leader in maternal and child health, home visiting, intimate partner violence, immigrant health, and health equity. Levesque leads Education Development Center’s Home Visiting Collaborative Improvement and Innovation Network (CoIIN). In support of federal Maternal Health priorities, Levesque also facilitates the state of Massachusetts’ Maternal Health Task Force to develop a strategic plan to achieve reproductive health equity for all people in the state. She holds an MPH in Health Policy and Management from Boston University School of Public Health and a BA in Political Science from Boston University and is currently pursuing her Doctor of Public Health in Leadership in Management. She is a native of Caracas, Venezuela, and is fluent in Spanish and English.
Allison works in Human Resources for a property management company and is a participant in the MGH Mothers Study. She brings a personal perspective to the PTSD Following Traumatic Childbirth presentation, having given birth to her son via an unplanned cesarean section in May of 2023. Allison is passionate about supporting other mothers by sharing her experiences and contributing to important research on maternal health.
Amy is the Clinical Director at the Center for Early Relationship Support (CERS ®), a center of excellence for client services, professional development, reflective supervision, and consultation that focuses on the earliest infant-parent relationships. She holds a post-graduate certificate in infant mental health and is endorsed at the Mentor level by the MA Association of Infant Mental Health. She has practiced, provided consultation, and supervised home-based and residential treatment settings. She has provided training to practitioners locally, nationally, and internationally on attachment-based interventions, treatment for substance mis-using parents and their infants, interventions for perinatal depression, and program evaluation. In her current role, she oversees all aspects of CERS’ therapeutic interventions for parents and infants impacted by trauma, substance mis-use, medical complexity, perinatal loss, and other complex stressors.