On January 13, more than one hundred and twenty people attended the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences first ever virtual Research Retreat. The goal of the retreat is to foster collaboration and community among our researchers, support promising new ideas, and share knowledge and expertise, all in service of improving the health of the public. Without any space constraints, we were able to open the retreat this year to senior research staff in addition to research faculty and research-focused trainees. 100% of attendees who completed the post-retreat survey indicated the retreat was valuable.
In addition to an overview of our research portfolio by Chair Jürgen Unützer, MD, MPH, MA, we had two keynote presentations. The first was on Seattle Children’s NIH Diversity Supplement Connections Program given by Tumaini Coker, MD, MBA,Ashley Gevaart-Durkin, MPH, PMP, and Christina Riley, MAR, MPhil. The goal of the DS Connections Program is to increase the number of Diversity Supplements Awarded at Seattle Children’s through a wholistic approach, and we are currently reviewing what we can do to improve the diversity of our own research faculty through the pursuit of NIH minority supplements. The second keynote was an Introduction to the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute (ADAI), our newest program, given by ADAI Director Susan Ferguson, PhD.
The morning presentations were followed by a diverse set of breakout sessions led by department faculty members including Research pearls: lessons learned from forty years of receiving NIH grant support (Michael V. Vitiello, PhD); Conducting research during a pandemic (Pat Areán, PhD, Christine Lee, PhD, and Jennifer Cadigan, PhD); What should mental health researchers know about parenting? (Larry Wissow, MD, MPH); Integrating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in all levels of research, shown in photo (Seema Clifasefi, PhD, and Myra Parker, PhD, JD, MPH); Promoting collaboration between clinical researchers and basic science researchers (Jürgen Unützer, MD, MPH, MA, Murray Raskind, MD, John Neumaier, MD, PhD, Erik Carlson, MD, PhD, Rebecca Hendrickson, MD, PhD); and Technology in mental health: building a research to practice to policy pipeline (Dror Ben-Zeev, PhD, Pamela Y. Collins, MD, MPH, Greg Reger, PhD, Jim Vollendroff, MPA).
A big thank you to Alison Laing, Associate Director of Research Operations, Semhar Abraha, Department Operations Manager, and Mike Walker, Senior Computer Specialist, for their good work in organizing this annual event!
