The Southam-Gerow lab is a busy and exciting place to work and learn. Our focus is the improvement of mental health services for children and families and we are active dissemination and implementation (D&I) researchers.

Technical Assistance for Virginia. Our current focus is the Center for Evidence-based Partnerships in Virginia (CEP-Va), a state-supported technical assistance center for the commonwealth of Virginia. We are partnered with state government agencies, provider organizations, and many others to collaborate on ambitious efforts to strengthen the state’s behavioral health system. CEP-Va was formed in 2019 and has contracts with multiple state agencies. Most of our current work focuses on implementation related to the 2018 federal law called Family First. The CEP-Va team is growing and includes faculty from PSYC and the School of Social Work.

Past lab foci. Some of our past work has focused on other areas, including

1. Treatment integrity measurement development

2. Community engaged treatment adaptation project in Chesterfield County, VA

3. Emotion regulation in child clinical populations

4. A collaboration with a large public, community-based mental health agency in the Washington, DC metro area designed to map practice patterns of therapists to the evidence base. 

5. With Dr. Julia Cox leading the charge, and in collaboration with  Abbie Kinnebrew, formerly in VCU’s School of Social Work  and Betsy Farmer from U-Pitt’s School of Social Work, we conducted a series of studies related to training and workforce development in social work.

6. Finally, our lab completed a pediatric primary care screening study in which we collected survey and focus group data on a sample of more than 180 children and their caregivers.