Conference Program

Dr. Bradley L. Schlaggar (ScB Brown University 1986; MD/PhD Washington University 1994) is the President and CEO of Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, MD, where he leads a team of more than 3,000 faculty and staff members to advance the organization’s longstanding mission of improving the lives of children, adolescents and young adults with disorders and injuries of the developing nervous system through clinical care, research, education, community partnership, advocacy, and training. He is also a Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Schlaggar directs the NICHD funded Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities Research Center at Kennedy Krieger Institute. He also directs the NINDS funded Child Neurologist Career Development Program, supporting the early career development of aspiring physician-scientists. Prior to moving to Baltimore in August 2018, Dr. Schlaggar was the A. Ernest and Jane G. Stein Professor of Developmental Neurology, and Professor of Neurology, Radiology, Neuroscience, Psychiatry, and Pediatrics, at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine where he served as the Head of Pediatric & Developmental Neurology and Neurologist-in-Chief at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Schlaggar’s research efforts are directed at understanding the development of the brain’s functional network architecture in typically and atypically developing children. He has over 200 publications and is recognized as a highly-cited (i.e., in the top 1 percent) investigator. He has received numerous awards for research, mentorship, clinical care, community service, and leadership, including the Philip R Dodge Young Investigator Award (2003) from the Child Neurology Society, the Humanitarian Award (2007) from the Tourette Association of America, the Norman Geschwind Award for Behavioral Neurology (2009) from the American Academy of Neurology, the E. Mead Johnson Award (2013) from the Society for Pediatric Research, the Frank Hatch Award (2014) for Outstanding Community Service from the John Merck Foundation, the Most Admired CEO Award (2022) from The Daily Record (Maryland), and the Huttenlocher Award from the Flux Society for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.  In 2021, he was elected into the Association of American Physicians.  

Dr. Patricia Cavazos is a Professor and Division Director in the Department of Psychiatry at WashU Medicine. She is also a licensed clinical psychologist. Her clinical research focuses on health disparities and the use of technology to improve substance use assessment and treatment.  She has been funded by the National Institutes of Health for nearly 20 years and she authored more than 150 peer-reviewed papers focused on understanding, preventing, and evaluating treatments for mental illness and substance use disorders. She is also passionate about mentoring. In 2020, Dr. Cavazos was named Outstanding Global Health Mentor by the Institute of Public Health at WashU Medicine and in 2023, she was awarded the Clinical Research Training Center Mentor of the Year at WashU Medicine.

Dr. Anastasia Dimitropoulos is a Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences and the Director of the Schubert Center for Child Studies at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her doctorate in psychology from Vanderbilt University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale University Child Study Center. The mission of the Schubert Center is to bridge research, policy, education, and practice to improve the lives of children and youth. As director, she oversees center operations and programming, leads an undergraduate minor in childhood studies, and oversees a research partnership with a local nonprofit. In her lab, Dr. Dimitropoulos has been engaged in research on Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) and autism for over twenty-five years. Her research currently focuses on building a play-based intervention program to optimize development and reduce behavior challenges in these populations.

Dr. Lora Iannotti is a professor of public health at the Brown School and founding director of the E3 Nutrition Lab at WashU in St. Louis. Her lab aims to identify nutrition solutions that embrace principles embodied in the three E’s:  equity, environment, and evolution. Dr. Iannotti leads projects in Ecuador, Haiti, and Madagascar where she collaborates with local partners to test innovative approaches to achieving sustainable, healthy dietary patterns that improve young child growth and brain development. Her research related to animal source foods has informed the global discourse on nutrition equity, climate change, and planetary boundaries. Dr. Iannotti is Director of Planetary Health and Environmental Justice for the Center for the Environment at WashU. 

Dr. Iannotti serves on several global working groups to inform nutrition policy.  She was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Guidelines Development Group for Complementary Feeding and currently serves on a UNICEF-led task force to implement the guidelines. For the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Dr. Iannotti serves as consultant on initiatives related to animal source foods and human health. She is nutrition lead on the USAID Feed the Future Fish Innovation Lab management entity.  

Dr. Iannotti received her doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a Master of Arts Degree in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia.