2024-2025 Scholars
The next generation of life course intervention researchers.
Building upon the success of the Life Course Intervention Research Network Scholar Program, we are excited to welcome our new class of LCT-RN Scholars! These eight scholars come from disciplines including public health, social work, psychology, education, and medicine, and they bring diverse research and practice experience to their study of life course health development and its application to interventions.
Abigail Arons
Dr. Abigail Arons is an Internal Medicine-Pediatrics physician and a fellow in the National Clinician Scholars Program at UCSF. She works on strategic health policy design over the life course, and her current research focuses on diabetes prevention in young adults. She came to medicine having spent several years working in state and national health policy. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Smith College, a Master of Public Affairs at the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin, and completed medical school at UCSF, and residency at UCLA.
Griffin Gorsky
Griffin was born and raised just outside of Portland, Maine and travelled West for college at Stanford University. After college she spent three years teaching Seventh Grade Science at a Title 1 school in San Francisco through Teach for America. She then completed medical school at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and a Master of Public Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. She briefly moved back East for her Pediatric Residency in the Boston Combined Residency Program at Boston Children's Hospital and Boston Medical Center and is now back in San Francisco at the University of California, San Francisco for her fellowship in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine. Her research interests include the impact of Paid Family Medical Leave on neonatal outcomes, social determinants of health screening in the NICU, and the impact of eviction on child health. She currently lives in San Francisco with her husband John, 8 month old Owen, and dog Arya.
Gen Guyol
Gen Guyol is a Neonatologist at Boston Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. Prior to medical school, she taught early elementary special education on the South Side of Chicago and earned a master’s degree in teaching. Her research focuses on educational outcomes among children born preterm. She is currently working on a mixed-methods project to examine early relational health among low-income families with children born preterm.
Jason Niu
Trained as an epidemiologist, I apply life course approaches to study cardiometabolic health, with focuses on pregnancy and the early life. I seek to understand how environmental risk factors, such as air pollution, climate change, and endocrine disrupting chemicals affect human health during sensitive life stages. My research further examines several biological mechanisms underlying the life course study of environmental risk factors on cardiometabolic health, including telomeres, mitochondria, and epigenetics.
Marianne Pugatch
Marianne Pugatch, Ph.D., LCSW, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago/Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. As a clinician-scientist, Dr. Pugatch develops digital health interventions to prevent risky alcohol use in underserved youth. She also researches the optimal implementation of substance use prevention and treatment practices into healthcare delivery systems. Her research includes collaborating with youth and caregivers and seeks to interrupt the high-risk addiction trajectory in adolescence, reduce opioid overdose fatalities, and mitigate health disparities.
Kunmi Sobowale
Dr. Kunmi Sobowale is an Assistant Professor and Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. His research interest is the prevention and early intervention of mental illness in the perinatal period and early childhood. His current research leverages digital health technologies, including mobile sensing devices and electronic health records data, to examine determinants of perinatal depression and the mechanisms by which perinatal depression affects the caregiver-child interaction and child developmental outcomes.
Nicole Telfer
Nicole A. Telfer, PhD is an applied developmental psychologist with expertise in the areas of child and adolescent development, educational contexts of development, and community psychology. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at UNC Chapel Hill. Currently, Dr. Telfer's research investigates the role of parents' ethnic-racial socialization (ERS) practices on the mental health and school outcomes of Black youth with neurodevelopmental disabilities. She is dedicated to improving the lives and wellbeing of Black families through community-based research and engagement.
Rebecca Tsevat
Dr. Rebecca Tsevat is a postdoctoral fellow in the National Clinician Scholars Program at UCLA. She completed her residency training in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at UCLA, followed by a year as a Chief Resident in Internal Medicine. Her research interests focus on the health of adolescents and young adults who have experienced chronic illness and/or chronic stress. She is also interested in improving transitions of care from pediatric to adult-oriented healthcare settings and understanding the impacts of adverse childhood experiences on health and educational outcomes in youth.