Alice Forrester, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Clifford Beers Child Guidance Clinic in New Haven, CT. Clifford Beers Clinic is a community based, mental health center for excellence for the treatment of children and families. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Community Providers Association and serves as a Commissioner for the Sandy Hook Commission. Prior achievements include serving as President of National Association for Drama Therapy (NADT) and Chair of the National Coalition for Creative Arts Therapy Associations (NCCATA). She has a Masters degree from New York University in Drama Therapy and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Fielding University.
Bill Halsey is currently the Director of Integrated Care at the Department of Social Services. He is responsible for the management of the four administrative services organizations that manage the medical, behavioral health, dental and non-emergency medical transportation services under Medicaid. Bill has been with DSS for 4 and half years and prior to joining DSS, he was the Director of Managed Services at DMHAS.
Dr. Megan V. Smith is an Assistant professor of Psychiatry, Child Study and Public Health at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Smith conducts clinical and community-partnered research in the area of maternal and child mental health and racial, ethnic and gender-based disparities in mental health and illness. Dr. Smith serves on the Mood Disorders Literature Review Subgroup, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) of the Gender/Cross Cultural Study Group, the State of Connecticut Two Generational Advisory Committee and is the Principal Investigator of the New Haven Mental health Outreach for MotherS (MOMS) Partnership, a community-academic collaboration to create citywide systems for the promotion of mental health for low-income mothers and their children in New Haven, Connecticut. She is the principal investigator on several grants focusing on depression, trauma and substance abuse in pregnancy, the postpartum period, and parenting and most recently received funding from the National Institutes of Mental Health to create a smartphone application to promote the mental health of new mothers. She is a current recipient of a Building Interdisciplinary Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) career award from the National Institute of Health, Office of Research on Women’s Health and Distinguished Investigator Awards from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression and the North American Society for Psychosocial Obstetrics & Gynecology. Dr. Smith also serves as a board member of the National Diaper Bank Network and co-chairs the Yale School of Medicine Program on the Psychobiology of Parenting and Partnerships. Additionally, Dr. Smith teaches classes on maternal and child mental health and disparities in mental health at the Yale School of Public Health.
Carol Stone, PhD, MPH, MA, MAS. Dr. Stone, supervising epidemiologist, has been with the Connecticut Department of Public Health since 2002. She performs public health surveillance and research on health data that addresses emerging health issues. She is currently the Project Director/Principal Investigator for the Connecticut Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (CT BRFSS), a state adult health survey operated with funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Before joining the Department, Dr. Stone was Associate Professor of Biochemistry and an NIH-funded biomedical researcher, first at the Indiana University Medical Center, and later at Stevens Institute of Technology, where she also served as co-Director of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.