Leading experts in psychology at CU Boulder, CU Anschutz and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital are hosting a panel and Q&A about the profound impact the pandemic has had on the mental health of children, family and college students.
The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held Wednesday, Oct. 14, from 3 to 4 p.m. Mountain Time.
The webinar will address how a virtual learning set-up affects kids, the effects of the pandemic specifically on youth dealing with illness, how compulsive consumption of news may affect mental health, a look at ways this pandemic and its effects are distinct from past disasters like 9/11, and more.
The webinar will be moderated by Aditi Subramaniam, a neuroscience PhD turned freelance science writer. The panel will feature:
- June Gruber, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU Boulder and director of the Positive Emotion and Psychopathology Laboratory. Gruber received her PhD from UC Berkeley and was previously an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University. Her research focuses on describing the ways in which positive emotions can go awry and how aspects of positive emotion can be predictors of behaviors that stop a person from adapting to new or difficult circumstances.
- Steven Berkowitz, professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Dr. Berkowitz leads a statewide initiative in Colorado to provide mental health resources to healthcare workers to help them through this difficult time.
- Kendra Parris, psychologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. Her research focuses on the psychosocial functioning of children and adolescents undergoing bone marrow transplantation and on psychological adjustments to illness and chronic medical conditions in children and teens.
This panel is part of a free series about COVID-19 science for media and the public, taking place in advance of ScienceWriters2020, the nation’s largest science journalism conference.
Members of the National Association of Science Writers who attend the 2020 virtual conference will have the chance to hear from Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at CU Boulder, speak about how forest fires are interacting with climate change and Arctic warming; and from Maxwell Boykoff, professor of environmental studies at CU Boulder and fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), about his work in the Media and Climate Change Observatory and how different kinds of reporting about climate do—and do not—resonate broadly with the public.
ScienceWriters2021 will be hosted by CU Boulder and CU Anschutz in the fall of 2021.
