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Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, LCSW (she/her) is a nationally award-winning pediatric therapist and community organizer who helps parents weave social justice actions into their daily parenting to promote their children’s development for 20 years.

Through the Come Back to Care podcast and her book, Raising Change Agents: Practicing Social Justice in Everyday Parenting, Nat translates developmental psychology and social justice theories into actionable invitations for parents to make parenting political in practical ways.

Nat also shares her clinical work with mental health and early care and education providers internationally. In her keynote addresses and workshops, Nat supports perinatal-to-five care providers in closing the gap between their social justice intentions and actions. She operationalizes equity, justice, and liberation so that providers can root their services in radical care and address burnout and moral injury.

Nat believes that when parents and providers alike heal our inner child and internalized oppression wounds in a community, we put fragmented pieces of ourselves together to show up to both parenting and community organizing with our whole selves. Then, we can dismantle systemic oppression and rebuild a culture that’s rooted in liberation for our future generations.

Her decolonized pediatric and family mental health approach received a Congressional Commendation read into the Congressional Record by Congresswoman Delia Ramirez. Nat was also featured in Chicago’s WGN9, and was awarded the Zero to Three Award for 2021 Emerging Leadership and the 2024-2026 Zero to Three Fellowship. Her most recent publications include an academic article in the June 2022 Zero to Three Journal and an op-ed piece in Condé Nast’s Them.

Nat is a graduate of the Erikson Institute’s Social Work Program. She also holds another master’s degree in Infancy & Early Childhood Special Education from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Dani Dumitriu, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics (in Psychiatry) and Director of the Center for Early Relational Health. She dedicates 80% of her time to research and 20% to active pediatric practice in the Newborn Medicine Unit at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York.

Dr. Dumitriu is internationally recognized for her expertise in pediatrics, neuroscience, resilience, family, and clinician-inclusive study design, and dyadic measures of parent-child health, such as maternal-infant connection, prenatal and early postnatal influences (including stress) on maternal-infant health, and the relationship between early relational health and life course health outcomes.

The uniting principle of Dr. Dumitriu’s multifaceted research program is to actuate a strengths-based pivot in pediatrics: preventing pathology by promoting resiliency. From basic science through clinical & implementation studies, her multi-modal, multi-species, multi-scale research focuses on understanding and harnessing the neurocircuits of resilience, toward spearheading novel approaches to universal primary prevention.

One of the top-funded researchers in the Department of Pediatrics, Dr. Dumitriu, also actively leads field-building work. She co-founded the Maternal Child Research Operations (MaCRO) Consortium at Columbia (a coordinating hub for research that spans obstetrics, pediatrics, and psychiatry) and is revolutionizing family- and pediatrician-inclusive research through a unique partnership between CERH, Reach Out and Read, and Nurture Connection (at Georgetown University’s Thrive Center for Children, Families, and Communities). Together, they co-lead the movement to meaningfully advance the field of ERH. Dr. Dumitriu further serves on the steering committee for Nurture Connection and on the Foundation for Social Connection’s Scientific Advisory Council.