Margaret Wolan Sullivan named UMDNJ Assoc. Dean

Margaret Wolan Sullivan, PhD, of Somerville, has been named as professor and associate dean for research of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) School of Nursing.

“A developmental psychologist, Dr. Sullivan has an outstanding history of research and scholarship particularly focused on understanding and improving the mental health of infants and young children,” said UMDNJ Dean Susan Salmond, EdD, RN. “Since the nursing profession addresses mental and physical health of individuals from birth to end-of-life, Dr. Sullivan brings welcome expertise to the leadership team at our school as we strengthen our research enterprise across a range of subject areas.”

Prior to joining UMDNJ-School of Nursing, Sullivan served from 2007 to 2012 as associate director and from 2000-2006 as co-associate director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS), where she held various faculty positions beginning in 1983. Sullivan remains an adjunct faculty member in the department of pediatrics at RWJMS and an associate member of the psychology faculty at The Graduate School, Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey.

She earned her PhD in Psychology from Rutgers, where she completed her thesis on infant learning, emotion and memory. Sullivan’s research interests have focused on the relation between emotion and cognition in infants and preschoolers as well as early intervention methods for developmentally disabled and physically challenged infants and young children. Most recently she served as a consulting psychologist in the department of medicine at PSEG Children’s Specialized Hospital in New Brunswick, where she worked with the occupational therapy team to improve data-based assessments of therapy protocols.

She has a long history of securing research grants from private foundations and federal agencies such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Maternal Child Health Program, NationalInstitute on Drug Abuse, and National Science Foundation.

Her current and recent research projects include two major studies supported by the National Institute of Mental Health. She is principal investigator of “Emotions and risk for psychopathology in infants and young children,” and co-director (with Michael Lewis) of a longitudinal project entitled“Maltreated Children’s Emotions and Self-Beliefs.”

An author of numerous peer-reviewed articles in high-impact journals, book chapters, and other publications, she is a former consultingeditor for Infants and Young Children: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Special Care Practices. She currently serves on the editorial board of Child Maltreatment, and reviews regularly for a number of developmental and mental health journals. She is a standing grant panelist at NIH’s Center for Scientific Review and an active member of American Psychological Society, the International Society on Infancy Research, and the Society for Research on Child Development.

The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) is New Jersey’s only health sciences university with more than 6,000 students on five campuses attending three medical schools, the State’s only dental school, a graduate school of biomedical sciences, a school of health related professions, a school of nursing and New Jersey’s only school of public health. UMDNJ operates University Hospital, a Level I Trauma Center in Newark, and University Behavioral HealthCare, which provides a continuum of healthcare services with multiple locations throughout the State.

Source: UMDNJ


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