Kathryn E. Barnard, RN, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Nursing at the University of Washington. Her pioneering work to improve the physical and mental health outcomes of infants and young children has earned her numerous honors, including the Gustav O. Leinhard Award from the Institute of Medicine, and, from the American Academy of Nursing, both the Episteme Award, the highest honor in nursing, and the Living Legend Award, in 2006. Kathryn Barnard has devoted her entire career to promoting understanding of the impact of the first three years of life on a child's later physical, psychological and emotional health. She is the founder of the NCAST program providing health care workers around the globe with the first empirically proven guidelines to assess infant development and intervene with appropriate parent-child interactions. Barnard has worked over the past two decades with the Washington Department of Health providing consultation and training on child health assessment, parent-child interaction and preventive health strategies. During the past five years she was involved with the Department in developing a testing means of identifying risk and protective factors for parenting. She also directed the Washington State Plan and as such developed the Consortium of Washington sites implementing the Nurse Family Partnership. Kathryn Barnard is founding director of the Center on Infant Mental Health and Development at the University of Washington, which opened in 2001.

Email Address: kathyb@u.washington.edu

Rebecca Kang, RN, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychosocial & Community Health in the UW School of Nursing, is a public health nurse with over 20 years experience teaching and evaluating public health programs. Her area of expertise is creating early parent-child interventions, including culturally sensitive adaptations. Kang has shared her knowledge of home visiting with public and private organizations and was instrumental in creating a series of successful partnerships between the UW School of Nursing and medically underserved communities in the Seattle area. As a public health nurse, Kang has long recognized the value of providing emotional support, guidance and concrete assistance to mothers or families with infants at home, in order to advance the healthy social and emotional development of the baby. She led the Nurse Family Partnership program for the Washington State Consortium and is a core faculty member in the UW Center on Infant Mental Health and Development. Kang was recently honored with the Asian American Living Pioneer Award for her research on parent-child interactions between Hawaiian and Korean mothers and infants. She is also Principal Investigator of a new grant for distance learning in community health nursing graduate education.

Email: becca@u.washington.edu

Lana Conrad, RN, MHSc.(HCP), CNS/NNP is a neonatal nurse practitioner specializing in the care of high risk infants and their families who is a certified instructor in the PCI and Keys to Caregiving NCAST programs. She is also trained as a supervisor in the Nurse Family Partnership program. Conrad has done extensive teaching, program development, supervision and research relating to infant care and the mother-child relationship for the past ten years as well as publishing and lecturing on physical assessment of the neonatal and home-based follow-ups. She is currently a doctoral student in nursing at the University of Washington under the mentorship of Kathryn Barnard, where she received academic honors as an Outstanding Student in 2003. Email:

lanac@u.washington.edu .

Kathleen Dannenhold, B.A., is a writer and public relations specialist who served as Director of Communications for the UW School of Nursing for five years before joining the staff of the Center on Infant Mental Health and Development. She is the former editor of Connections and Research Review, and was an integral force in the creation of the current School of Nursing website. Email: kathyd@u.washington.edu

For general inquiries about SteppingUp or the University of Washington First Steps program, please call (206) 543-9200 or write SteppingUp, UW Box 357920, Seattle, Washington 98195-7920.