The Grand Challenge of Child Mental Health: Lessons from the Great Smoky Mountains Study
Join us on Wednesday, April 15th for the Department of Epidemiology seminar series featuring Dr. Bill Copeland discussing The Grand Challenge of Child Mental Health: Lessons from the Great Smoky Mountains Study.
Abstract: Child psychopathology is common, costly, and impairing. Indeed, the greatest burden of disease in the first 2 decades of life is related to mental health. This presents a great opportunity: Effective care for these diseases in childhood has the potential to mitigate and forestall later psychopathology (i.e., treatment as prevention). This talk will use data from a 30+ year psychiatric epidemiological study to demonstrate the ways in which this opportunity is often squandered contributing to misery, morbidity, and mortality in adulthood.
Bio: Dr. Copeland is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont and the Thomas M Achenbach Chair in Developmental Psychopathology. He was trained as a clinical psychologist at the University of Vermont and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology at Duke University Medical Center. He is the principal investigator of the prospective, longitudinal Great Smoky Mountains Study has been following 1420 participants in rural Appalachia for over 30 years to understand the long-term consequences of early adverse experiences and the development of mental illness. His research program has focused on understanding the developmental epidemiology of emotional and behavior problems across the lifespan. This work includes understanding the interplay between early adverse experiences and genetic vulnerability with other individual, family, and contextual characteristics.
His research has been supported by NIMH, NIDA, NICHD, NIA, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. This program of research has led to over 180 peer-reviewed manuscripts including publications in JAMA, JAMA: Psychiatry, the American Journal of Psychiatry, Lancet Psychiatry, American Journal of Public Health, Molecular Psychiatry, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Communications. His work has been covered in such national news outlets as Slate, the New York Times, TIME magazine and CNN. Dr. Copeland was named on the Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher list in 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.
Speaker Information
Bill Copeland, PhD
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