6340 Flank Drive Harrisburg
PA 17112
Building a Healthy Brain in Children Who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing **Registration Required**
Hearing loss is a neurological emergency that can impact a child’s brain development. Dr. Judy Cameron will address how the architecture of the brain is formed prenatally until about 25 years of age, with the greatest burst of development occurring in the early years of life. She will show how hearing differences, experiences, and communication access interact with genetics to shape the brain circuits that children form and will use the rest of their lives for all that they do. The presentation will also cover the impact of early life adversity on the development of brain circuits and how to help children strengthen brain pathways to promote resilience. Dr. Cameron will focus on how this information can be made available to parents, childcare providers and others who work with children using hands-on learning activities.
Judy L. Cameron, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychiatry University of Pittsburgh; Director of Working For Kids: Building Skills, Member of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child at Harvard University. Dr. Cameron is a developmental neurobiologist who studies how life experiences shape brain development, the identification of factors that lead to stress sensitivity versus stress resilience, and the interactions between physical health and mental health. Dr. Cameron’s newest research initiative is Working for Kids: Building Skills , which is a novel community-based program that teaches the fundamentals of brain development to those who work with children at a community level. This initiative provides a community training program and is evaluating the effect of this intervention on child development as well as health. Working For Teens is a branch of Working for Kids: Building Skills that teaches about the brain pathways that are developing in the teenage years through the mid-twenties, and has developed educational strategies that help teens strengthen brain pathways for problem solving, complex reasoning, planning, decision-making and inhibitory control. These programs have won several innovation awards in Pittsburgh, as well as from the National Science Foundation.
