Whole Child Award

Matthew Melmed, JD, Executive Director of ZERO TO THREE is an internationally recognized leader and tireless advocate devoted to promoting the health and development of infants and toddlers. Bringing together the perspectives of many fields and specialties with cutting-edge research about the importance of early connections, Mr. Melmed is committed to translating the science of early childhood development into practical resources and policies that support very young children and their families. Since 1995 he has guided the growth of the organization’s activities to enhance early social emotional development through promotion, prevention and treatment strategies. Under his leadership, the organization’s budget has grown more than ten-fold and ZERO TO THREE’s reach now extends to millions of parents, professionals and policymakers. In recognition, Worth Magazine selected ZERO TO THREE as one of “America’s 100 Best Charities.”

Prior, Mr. Melmed served for 13 years as Executive Director of the Connecticut Association for Human Services. He began his career as a staff attorney for Connecticut Legal Services in 1978. Mr. Melmed is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of S.U.N.Y. Binghamton, where he graduated with highest academic honors. He received his Juris Doctor degree from the Faculty of Law and Jurisprudence at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo.

Mr. Melmed is Chair of the Board of Generations United which promotes intergenerational collaboration for the enduring benefit of all and is the is the immediate past Board Chair of the Food Research and Action Center, the nation’s leading domestic anti-hunger policy organization. He served as the first elected Chair of the Children’s Leadership Council, a coalition of 55 leading national organizations working together to improve the health, education and well-being of children and youth. He is a Trustee of the Turrell Fund and has been a Director on such boards as the I Am Your Child Foundation.

Mr. Melmed is the recipient of multiple community, state, and national honors, including the prestigious Sonya Bemporad Award by the World Association of Infant Mental Health. This award was given in recognition of significant contributions to the advancement of social and public policies that contribute to the mental health and overall benefit of infants, toddlers, and their families. In 2018, the Simms/Mann Institute recognized Mr. Melmed with the 2018 Whole Child “Visionary” Award. The award recognizes individuals who have made a “significant, tangible, and lasting impact” on children for a sustained period, who “exhibit strong passion and commitment” to the whole child movement, and who exhibit “a high degree of personal integrity.”

Dr. Andrew N. Meltzoff holds the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair and is the Co-Director of the University of Washington Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. A graduate of Harvard University, with a PhD from Oxford University, he is an internationally renowned expert on infant and child development. His discoveries about infant imitation have revolutionized our understanding of early cognition, personality, and brain development. His research on social-emotional development and children’s understanding of other people has helped shape policy and practice.

Dr. Meltzoff’s 20 years of research on young children has had far-reaching implications for cognitive science, especially for ideas about memory and its development; for brain science, especially for ideas about common coding and shared neural circuits for perception and action; and for early education and parenting, particularly for ideas about the importance of role models, both adults and peers, in child development.

He is the co-author of two books about early learning and the brain: The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind (Morrow Press, 2000) and Words, Thoughts and Theories (MIT Press, 1997). He is also co-editor of The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution and Brain Bases (Cambridge University Press, 2002), a unique, multidisciplinary volume combining brain science, evolutionary theory, and developmental psychology.

Dr. Meltzoff is the recipient of a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health. In 2005, he was the recipient of an award for outstanding research from the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics and the Kenneth Craik Award in Psychology, Cambridge University, England. Dr. Meltzoff is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychological Society. He has been inducted into the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and is the recipient of the James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Award.

Dr. Meltzoff is active in volunteer work concerning children, having served on the board of directors of the Foundation for Early Learning, the board of directors of the University Child Development School, the National Advisory Committee for Grants of the March of Dimes Foundation, and the national advisory board of Parents Magazine.

Dr. Meltzoff has appeared on the PBS programs Scientific American Frontiers and NOVA, on ABC’s World News Now, NBC’s Today Show, the CBC Discovery series, and in numerous other media outlets. He is married to Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl, and they have one daughter.

Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl is the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair for Early Childhood Learning, Co-Director of the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, Director of the NSF-funded Science of Learning Center, and Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences. She is internationally recognized for her research on early language and brain development, and studies that show how young children learn. Dr. Kuhl’s work has played a major role in demonstrating how early exposure to language alters the brain. It has implications for critical periods in development, for bilingual education and reading readiness, for developmental disabilities involving language, and for research on computer understanding of speech.

Dr. Kuhl is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Rodin Academy, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. She was awarded the Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society of America in 1997, and in 2005, the Kenneth Craik Research Award from Cambridge University. She received the University of Washington’s Faculty Lectureship Award in 1998, and in the 2007, Dr. Kuhl was awarded the University of Minnesota’s Outstanding Achievement Award. Dr. Kuhl is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Acoustical Society of America, the Cognitive Science Society and the American Psychological Society. In 2008 Dr. Kuhl was awarded the Gold Medal from Acoustical Society of America for her work on learning and the brain. In 2011 in Paris, she was awarded the IPSEN Fondation’s Jean-Louis Signoret Neuropsychology Prize.

Dr. Kuhl was one of six scientists invited to the White House in 1997 to make a presentation at President and Mrs. Clinton’s Conference on “Early Learning and the Brain.” In 2001, she was invited to make a presentation at President and Mrs. Bush’s White House Summit on “Early Cognitive Development: Ready to Read, Ready to Learn.” In 2000, she co-authored The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn (Morrow Press).

Dr. Kuhl’s work has been widely covered by the media. She has appeared in the Discovery television series “The Baby Human”; the NOVA series “The Mind”; the “The Power of Ideas” on PBS; and “The Secret Life of the Brain,” also on PBS. She has discussed her research findings on early learning and the brain at NBC’s Education Nation, and on The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, NHK, CNN, and in The New York Times, Time, and Newsweek.

W. Thomas Boyce is the Lisa and John Pritzker Distinguished Professor of Developmental and Behavioral Health in the Departments of Pediatrics and Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco; he heads the Division of Developmental Medicine within the Department of Pediatrics. Previously, he was Professor of Pediatrics and the Sunny Hill Health Centre-BC Leadership Chair in Child Development at the University of British Columbia, in the Human Early Learning  Partnership, and at the Child and Family Research Institute of BC Children’s Hospital. Dr. Boyce has served as a member of Harvard University’s National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, UC Berkeley’s Institute of Human Development, as well as a founding co-Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program at Berkeley and UCSF. He co-directs the Child and Brain Development Program for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, serves on the Board on Children, Youth and Families of the National Academies, and was elected in 2011 to the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Boyce’s research addresses individual differences in children’s biological sensitivity to social contexts, such as the family, classroom and community. His work, which has generated nearly 200 scientific publications, demonstrates that a subset of children (“orchid children”) show exceptional biological susceptibility to their social conditions and bear higher risks of illness and developmental disorders in settings of adversity and stress. Taken together, findings from his research suggest that the supportiveness of early environments have important effects on children’s health and wellbeing and are the subject of a forthcoming book entitled The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Some Children Struggle and How All Can Thrive (Knopf, 2019).

Alicia F. Lieberman, Ph.D. holds the Irving B. Harris Endowed Chair of Infant Mental Health in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, where she is also Professor and Vice Chair for Academic Affairs. She is Director of the Child Trauma Research Program, San Francisco General Hospital and clinical consultant with the San Francisco Human Services Agency. She is past president of the board of Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families and is on the board of trustees of the Irving B. Harris Foundation.

Born and raised in Paraguay, she received her B.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ph.D. from The John Hopkins University. This national and cultural background informs her work on behalf of children and families from diverse ethnic and cultural origins. Her major interests include infant mental health, disorders of attachment, child-parent interventions with families experiencing multiple adversities, the effects of trauma and domestic violence in the first years of life, and treatment outcome research with traumatized young children and their parents. She is the lead developer of child-parent psychotherapy, an evidence-based, culturally informed treatment for traumatized young children and parents that is disseminated nationally and abroad. She is the author of The Emotional Life of the Toddler, which has been translated to several languages, and senior author of Losing a Parent to Death in the Early Years: Treating Traumatic Bereavement in Infancy and Early Childhood; Don’t Hit My Mommy!: A Treatment Manual for Child-Parent Psychotherapy with Young Witnesses of Family Violence; and Psychotherapy with Infants and Young Children: Repairing the Effect of Stress and Trauma on Early Attachment. She has edited or co-edited several books and is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on infant and early childhood mental health, including treatment of attachment disorders and traumatic stress. She was a member of the Attorney General Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence and has served in review panels for NIMH and other federal agencies. She lectures extensively in four continents and is a consultant to government agencies and private foundations nationally and abroad.

Dr. Lieberman is currently the Director of the Early Trauma Treatment Network (ETTN), a collaborative of four university sites that include the UCSF/SFGH Child Trauma Research Project, Boston Medical Center, Louisiana State University Medical Center, and Tulane University. ETTN is funded by the federal Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) as part of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a 80-site national initiative that has the mission of increasing the access and quality of services for children exposed to trauma in the United States. The program focuses on training clinicians, community providers and clinical researchers to help close the gap in services for low-income, culturally diverse underserved families and their young children.

Along with two sisters, Ben Danielson was raised by an amazing single mom who instilled in him an appreciation for the value of education and a desire to be a contributing member of the community. In college, he decided that being a doctor was a good way to meld his scientific and human-service interests. Since finishing his undergraduate studies in Boston, Dr. Danielson has spent his medical education, residency, and career in Seattle.

Dr. Danielson has been the Medical Director of the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic since 1999. He works alongside dedicated, talented staff who strive to uphold the clinic’s enduring tradition of growing wellness through quality care with dignity and community engagement, honoring culture, and sustaining trust. He also works on the inpatient service at Seattle Children’s Hospital. He is on the King County Board of Health, the Washington Health Benefit Exchange Board, and boards of various philanthropic organizations including the United Way of King County, The College Success Foundation, The Center for Children and Youth Justice, the Foundation for Healthy Generations. He also works with several community groups and coalitions dedicated to improving children’s health.

In addition to clinic based practice, Dr Danielson is an inpatient attending physician at Seattle Children’s Hospital. He also teaches and mentors through the University of Washington School of Medicine and Seattle Children’s Hospital’s Pediatric Residency Program.

Dr. Danielson believes that an opportunity to serve an individual or a community is a cherished privilege. He also subscribes to the truism that health is more than healthcare and that any healthcare provider who strives to improve health must be active beyond the realm of his or her medical practice.

Jack P. Shonkoff, M.D., is the Julius B. Richmond FAMRI Professor of Child Health and Development at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Graduate School of Education; Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital; and Founding Director of the university-wide Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. He currently serves as chair of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, a group of distinguished scholars whose mission is to bring credible science to bear on public policy affecting young children, and chairs the JPB Research Network on Toxic Stress, which is developing new knowledge and measurement capacity to assess the biological, bio-behavioral, and health consequences of excessive stress system activation. In 2011, he launched Frontiers of Innovation, a multi-sectoral collaboration among researchers, practitioners, policymakers, community leaders, parents, investors, and experts in systems change who are committed to achieving breakthrough outcomes for young children facing adversity.

Dr. Shonkoff has received multiple professional honors, including elected membership to the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), the C. Anderson Aldrich Award in Child Development from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Distinguished Contributions to Social Policy Award from the Society for Research in Child Development. He served as Chair of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families at the National Academy of Sciences and led a blue-ribbon committee that produced the landmark report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. He has authored more than 150 publications, including nine books and monographs.

Dr. Yogman has been in pediatric practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts for 20 years after several years working full time at Boston Children’s Hospital with Dr T Berry Brazelton. He is Assistant Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School where he teaches and does research on the father-child relationship, developmental interventions,and nutrition and behavior. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics since 1973 and was board certified in Developmental Behavioral pediatrics when it first became a subspecialty in 2002.

Previously, he has been Associate Chief of the Division of Child Development and Director of the Infant Health and Development Program at Children’s Hospital. He is the editor of several books (In Support of Families, published by Harvard University Press; Affective Development in Infancy; and a biennial series Theory and Research in Behavioral Pediatrics) and author of numerous articles and chapters on the father-infant relationship, infant diet and sleep, and parent-infant play. He gave the introductory testimony to hearings of the U.S. House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families on fathers and children in support of paternity leave in the early 1980’s. He was a member of the Harvard Working Group on Child Health Policy and the Children’s Initiative, a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Society for Pediatric Research, Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics and Society for Research in Child Development. He has been a consultant to the Congressional Select Panel on Child Health, NIH Advisory Committee on Physical Growth and the Massachusetts Daycare Committee. He has served on the Editorial Board of Child Development and Infant Mental Health and the Advisory Board of Nickleodeon Jr. Magazine, the Yearbook on Health and Medicine and the Fatherhood Project. He has been a trustee of the Boston Children’s Museum since 2000 , and advises the national collaboration of Children’s Museums Go Kids initiative to combat obesity. He has served on the Executive Board of the Massachusetts Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics since 2002 , has been a member of the MCAAP pediatric council since 1999, and the Obesity Committee since 2004. He consulted to the AAP task Force on the Family on the father’s role in childhood in October of 2001. He was recently appointed to the National AAP Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health and to the Massachusetts Special Commission Relative to Postpartum Depression. .Currently, he is Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Boston Children’s Museum and Chair of the Massachusetts Child Mental Health Task Force.

Dr. Yogman received his undergraduate degree from Williams College and his medical degree from Yale University. He holds a M. Sc. degree in Maternal and Child Health from Harvard School of Public Health. He is married to Dr Elizabeth Ascher, a cardiologist and has two daughters Madeline and Alexandra ,and three dogs Clementine and Winston,both dachshunds and Maisy Brown a chocolate Lab.