Overview
Robert T. Ammerman, PhD, ABPP, is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in the Division of Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.
He is Scientific Director of Every Child Succeeds, a community-based prevention program serving seven counties in Southwestern Ohio and Northern Kentucky.
Every Child Succeeds provides home visitation services to first-time mothers who have at least one of four risk criteria:
- unmarried,
- low income,
- under the age of 18, or
- inadequate prenatal care.
A collaborative of 15 agencies, Every Child Succeeds has served over 10,000 mothers and provided over 200,000 home visits since its inception in 1999. Through Every Child Succeeds, Dr. Ammerman has conducted research on child abuse prevention, maternal depression, retention in prevention programs, and quality assurance approaches to prevention services. Current funded research studies include
- the First Years Project, a study funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau to examine retention in home visitation programs; and
- the Mother and Infant Depression Improvement Study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, to conduct a clinical trial of In-Home Cognitive Behavior Therapy for depressed mothers in home visitation.
Additional research interests include a recently conducted study on behavioral and pharmacological treatments for children and adolescents with social anxiety disorder (funded by NIMH), social and emotional functioning in adolescents with spina bifida and non-verbal learning disability (funded by the National Institute on Disabilities and Rehabilitation Research).
