Eric Trupin, Ph.D.,(Professor and Director of Division of Public and Behavioral Health, Director of Evidence Based Practice Institute) is Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, Washington. He is a child psychologist and directed the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Children’s Hospital and Medical Center for twelve years.

Dr. Trupin is currently the Director of the Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy. This Division maintains a wide range of clinical, research and training programs primarily focused on implementing evidence based behavioral health practices to improve outcomes for children and adults. In 2007 the Washington State Legislature established an Evidence Based Institute within his Division.
He directs clinical and systems research programs supported by NIDA, The MacArthur Foundation and Paul Allen Foundation.

In 1989, in collaboration with the Washington State Legislature and Governor, he established the Washington Institute for Mental Illness Research and Training. The Institute has been recognized nationally as a highly successful public/academic collaboration. It has had a major impact on improving professional training, clinical care and health services research for individuals served in the public sector who have behavioral health needs.

During 1993-94, Dr. Trupin was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow, working for the U.S. Congress, House Ways and Means Committee.  The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill recognized him for his work promoting legislation to serve individuals with mental illness.
Dr. Trupin has been a consultant to numerous state and federal agencies on issues related to child and adolescent mental health. 

Eric J. Bruns, Ph.D., (Professor in Division of Public Behaviora Health and Justice Policy, Co-Director of Evidence Based Practice Insitute) is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr. Bruns’s research and other professional activities focus on public child-serving systems, and how to maximize their positive effects on youth with behavioral health needs and their families. Toward this end, Dr. Bruns chooses to work on several projects with the potential for significant public health impact.

• First, he is nationally known for his research and development work on the wraparound process, a widely-implemented care coordination model for children and youth with complex mental health needs. Improving the availability, quality, and effectiveness of wraparound will achieve substantial positive impact because wraparound is attempted widely in states and communities, focuses on youth with the most complex needs (and who demand the majority of system resources), and can serve a wide range of youth with complex needs across systems, including mental health, education, child welfare, and juvenile justice.
• Second, he is recognized for his research on school mental health services, including recent efforts to document the effects of school MH services on academic outcomes in the Seattle Public Schools. School-based health and mental health services have the potential for substantial public health impact and reduction in health disparities because of their accessibility to youth who may not otherwise access such services.
• Finally, with Eric Trupin, Ph.D., he co-directs several state-funded initiatives to improve the uptake of effective treatments to youth involved in both the mental health and child welfare systems in Washington State. These initiatives, including the Washington State Evidence Based Practice Institute, aim to support our state to make decisions and implement services based on evidence for effectiveness.

Dr. Bruns directs the National Wraparound Initiative, a national organization that conducts research and disseminates information to promote high quality and consistent wraparound implementation, and the Wraparound Evaluation and Research Team, which develops and supports use of fidelity measures for the wraparound process. He serves as Editor of the journal Report on Emotional and Behavioral Disorders in Youth and Associate Editor of the Journal of Child and Family Studies. He has served as Principal Investigator for four NIMH-funded studies in children’s mental health and authored over 50 refereed journal articles and book chapters.

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Suzanne Kerns, Ph.D., (Assistant Professor in Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy) is an Assistant Professor and licensed clinical psychologist at the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy. Clinical and research interests focus on translation of evidence based practices to real-world settings, their acquisition, adoption, and sustainability. She currently collaborates with agencies, communities and Tribes to develop strategic planning to increase effective utilization of evidence-based practices. Dr. Kerns directs the Interdisciplinary EBPI Workforce Development Initiative, designed to enhance provider skills to provide evidence-based services for children, youth, and families. She is a program consultant and involved in research of Family Integrated Transitions, an intervention targeting youth returning to their communities after being incarcerated, and Project Focus, an experimental study of strategies designed to increase access to evidence-based services for youth in foster care through caseworker and clinician training and consultation. She is also a certified trainer for Triple P Positive Parenting Program and works with two FCAP teams in Washington State.

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Michael Kisicki, MD, is an attending psychiatrist at the Echo Glen Children's Center, where he cares for juvenile criminal offenders with mental illness. He is also an attending physician at Seattle Children's Hospital psychiatry outpatient clinic. His clinical and research interests are the disruptive behavior disorders and the improvement of care for children and adolescents in the foster and correctional system. He also has interest and experience in the treatment of psychiatric sequelae of traumatic brain injury. Dr. Kisicki's teaching experience includes the supervision of general psychiatry residents in their clinical care of pediatric patients, as well as educating primary care physicians about the treatment of mental illness. He was awarded membership into the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society. He is a Fulbright Scholar in philosophy and was inducted into the Phi Sigma Tau Philosophy and the Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society. He enjoys hiking, archery and philately.

Terry Lee, M.D., is an Assistant Professor and child and adolescent psychiatrist in the Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy. His interests include the development and dissemination of evidence-based practices, and effective treatments for high needs youth, including youth involved with the juvenile justice and/or child welfare systems.  He currently provides psychiatric services for youth in King County Juvenile Detention, Washington State Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration and the King County Family Integrated Transitions program, an intensive community-base treatment serving youth with co-occurring mental health and substance youth disorders involved with the juvenile court system.  He chairs the Washington State Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration Psychiatry Quality Improvement Committee, and supervises trainees in the University of Washington Residency Program rotating at Echo Glen Children’s Center.  He is a consultant to the Harborview Foster Care Assessment Program and the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration Family Integrated Transitions Program. He is Co-Chair of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Adoption and Foster Care Committee.

Prior to his current position, Dr. McDonell was an attending psychologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital. He received his post-doctoral training at the Child and Study and Treatment Center (the State psychiatric hospital for children) through the University of Washington and received his doctorate in clinical psychology at Washington State University, where he received research and public policy training at the Washington Institute for Mental Health Research and Training (WIMHRT).

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Michael Pullmann, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. His primary research interest focuses on community-based participatory research approaches in children’s mental health services, education, and juvenile justice, especially family involvement in guiding policy and practice. His secondary interests include studying therapeutic or problem-solving courts such as Family Treatment Courts and Juvenile Drug Courts, longitudinal approaches to data analysis, and the use of large management information databases for research. He is currently involved in several projects at PBHJP. These include: an assessment of Disproportionate Minority Contact in Juvenile Justice in Washington State; program evaluations of King County's Juvenile Drug Court Enhancement Project and King County's Assertive Adolescent and Family Treatment Project; an evaluation of Seattle Public Schools' Family Support Program; analysis of an experimental study of Wraparound; a psychometric analysis of the Wraparound Fidelity Index; the King County Family Treatment Court evaluation; an analysis of Seattle Public Schools' School Based Health Center Program; and Juvenile Justice 101, part of the MacArthur Foundation's Models for Change project. He closely collaborates with family support organizations and Youth N' Action, a youth-led advocacy and support organization.

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Dr. Walker is currently the Principal Investigator on a National Institutes of Justice grant to study, in collaboration with the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration, the relationship between therapeutic skills acquisition, length of residential stay and community outcomes. She is also a Co-Principal Investigator with Dr. Eric Trupin on a MacArthur Foundation grant to implement state-level policy strategies to reduce the justice-involvement of youth with mental health disorders. Dr. Walker is also the Principal Investigator on a number of other studies to examine 1) The effectiveness of a community intervention for girl to prevent intimate partner violence; 2) A warrant prevention program focused on youth of color; 3) A King County prosecutor-diversion program to reduce offending; and 4) High quality mentoring programming. Previous projects include an evaluation of support groups for girls on probation, the development of a cultural adaptation toolkit for evidence-based practice, the development and evaluation of a cultural engagement training for mental health professionals, evaluation of a multi-state mental health training for juvenile justice staff, the development and testing of Juvenile Justice 101 and community-based participatory research with diverse communities.

In addition to her work in juvenile justice, Dr. Walker also collaborates with other faculty in the staff in PBHJP on state projects with Children's Administration and the Department of Social and Health Services. Dr. Walker is the lead on developing a technical assistance strategy for working with community agencies on evaluating internal programs and adapting existing programs for fit local needs as part of House Bill 2536. She is also significantly involved in the development of a quality assurance strategy to track elements of fidelity across programs with Children's Administration.

Aaron R. Lyon, Ph.D.
Acting Assistant Professor

Aaron Lyon, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and Acting Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine. His research focuses on increasing the accessibility and effectiveness of psychosocial interventions for children, adolescents, and families, delivered within contexts that routinely provide care to chronically-underserved populations (e.g., low-socioeconomic status and ethnic minority youth). Dr. Lyon’s recent projects have focused specifically on promoting mental health practitioner behavior change and the uptake of evidence-based practices by clinicians working in schools and community mental health settings. He is particularly interested in (1) the identification and implementation of low-cost, high-yield practices – such as the use of standardized assessment tools for outcome monitoring – to reduce the gap between typical and optimal practice in low-resource service contexts; (2) methods of promoting flexible and effective implementation of evidence-based psychosocial interventions for youth and families; and (3) development and adaptation of health-information technologies for use by school-based mental health practitioners.

Dr. Lyon is currently Principal Investigator on a National Institute of Mental Health Career Development Award to study the adaptation and implementation of a computerized measurement feedback system for clinical progress monitoring among school-based clinicians and Principal Investigator on a Pearson Early Career Grant, awarded by the American Psychological Foundation to explore methods of maximizing intervention-setting fit in school mental health. He is also a Co-Investigator on a grant funded by the Institute of Education Sciences to develop a brief, modular psychosocial intervention for youth experiencing a range of mental health problems in schools. In addition to grant-funded research, Dr. Lyon works with his colleagues in the Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy on implementation projects such as state-wide fidelity monitoring and evaluation of evidence-based practices (e.g., Parent-Child Interaction Therapy).

Shannon Dorsey, Ph.D., (Affiliate of Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy) has a PhD in Clinical Psychology and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington, School of Medicine and an adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology.  Her research is on evidence-based treatments (EBT) for children and adolescents, with a particular focus on EBT for youth impacted by trauma who are involved with child welfare and on clinician training and supervision strategies. She is the Principal Investigator on an NIMH-funded effectiveness trial evaluating Trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) and evidence-based engagement strategies for youth in foster care - Fostering Hope - and is involved in the evaluation of the SAMHSA-funded National Child Traumatic Stress Network. Dr. Dorsey is also currently working on a number of state and government-funded projects with the goal of enhancing outcomes for youth by improving training and supervision of clinicians in community settings. With Ms. Lucy Berliner, Dr. Dorsey also designed and directs the Washington State TF-CBT and CBT Plus Initiative, a statewide training and consultation program for clinicians who serve children and adolescents on Medicaid (funded by the Department of Behavioral Health and Recovery).

In addition to this domestic work, Dr. Dorsey also has been focusing on implementing EBT in low and middle income countries. She is a Co-Investigator on an NIMH-funded study examining the feasibility of providing TF-CBT to youth who have been orphaned in Tanzania, Pamoja Tunaweza. She also collaborates with colleagues in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health on a number of randomized controlled trials of a common elements, transdiagnostic approach to treating posttraumatic stress, anxiety, and depression in adults (USAID-funded; Iraq, Thailand, & Colombia).

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