Dr. Bonnie T. Zima, MD, MPH
Founding Director, Mental Health Informatics and Data Science (MINDS) Hub
Dr. Bonnie T. Zima, MD, MPH is a child psychiatrist and health services researcher. She is Professor-in-Residence and Founding Director of the Mental Health Informatics and Data Science (MINDS) Hub in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. She is a national and international leader in child mental health services research. Her research is dedicated to improving the quality of child mental health care, with priority placed on children enrolled in Medicaid-funded outpatient programs and underserved, at risk child populations. Her research spans identification of high unmet need for mental health care among high risk child populations, national pediatric hospitalization resource utilization and costs, validity of national quality measures, pediatric integrated care models, pediatric workforce development, and application of technologies and clinical informatics to improve child mental health care. She has received continuous extramural funding for her research throughout her career, exceeding $10.5 million. She has authored 120 peer-reviewed research papers in leading scientific journals, 10 book chapters, 72 national or technical reports, and 298 invited presentations. Her research has received all three national research awards from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), and in 2022 was the receipt of her Department’s Outstanding Research Mentor Award. In addition, Dr. Zima is a Member of the U.S. Child and Adult Core Set Annual Review Workgroup for Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (the Academies) Committee on the Pediatric Subspecialty Workforce and its Impact on Child Health and Well-Being, National Advisory Board, Enhancing Systems of Care for Children with Medical Complexity Coordinating Center funded by HRSA, Corresponding Member of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Committee on Quality Measure and Performance, and Ex-officio Member AACAP Committee on Research. She completed a ten-year term on the Standing Behavioral Health and Substance Use Committee for the National Quality Forum (contract awarded to Battelle in 2023) and a five-year term as Consulting Editor for the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. She is a Distinguished Fellow of AACAP and APA.
Juliet Edgcomb, MD PhD
Associate Director
Juliet Beni Edgcomb, MD PhD, is the Associate Director of the Semel Institute for Mental Health Informatics and Data Science (MINDS) Hub and an Assistant Professor-in-Residence in the Department of Psychiatry, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She is a child psychiatrist, physician informaticist, and health services researcher. Dr. Edgcomb has expertise in providing psychiatric care for adults and children with mental health conditions, as well as research experience in using clinical data to inform precision approaches to youth mental health. Her research focus builds upon a PhD in Social Psychology with an area of specialization in quantitative methods and computational modeling of patient-centered research outcomes, followed by postdoctoral training in child mental health intervention research methods. As Principal Investigator she has led studies supported by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, American Psychiatric Association, and Thrasher Research Fund. She spearheads a study supported by the Foundation for the National Institute of Health (FNIH) Deeda Blair Research Initiative to develop weakly supervised and deep learning approaches to detect signals of childhood-onset depression and psychosis in medical records. Her passion is to narrow the research-to-practice gap between clinical informatics and child mental health care, and, in turn, improve the lives of young people with mental illness.
Kristen Choi
Associate Director of the MINDS Hub
Kristen Choi, PhD, RN, FAAN is a child/adolescent psychiatric nurse and Assistant Professor at the UCLA School of Nursing and UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Department of Health Policy and Management. Dr. Choi’s research aims to improve access to and delivery of mental health care for children, adolescents, and other underserved populations by studying healthcare delivery mechanisms that could be modified to improve population mental well-being. Her work also includes a focus on equity in mental health care and how mental health disparities can be eliminated. Dr. Choi is currently studying household and community adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), including bullying, school violence, and racial discrimination, and their role in youth brain and behavioral development. She is also studying implementation of trauma-informed care in mental health settings, including trauma-informed screening for ACEs. Other projects include research on mental health service access for LGBTQ youth; interventions to address social determinants of health; and equity in health services for autism and other developmental disabilities. She is an Adjunct Investigator in the Department of Research & Evaluation at KPSC and an Associate Director of Nursing for the UCLA National Clinician Scholars Program. As both a clinician and a scientist, Dr. Choi maintains a clinical practice as a registered nurse (RN) at a community psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles.
Blanche Wright, PhD
T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Blanche Wright, PhD is a clinical psychologist and implementation scientist. She is committed to reducing disparities that disfavor low-income and/or racial and ethnic minoritized individuals within the mental health sector. Her scholarship aims to help close the research-practice-policy gaps by applying interdisciplinary methods. In addition to her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from UCLA, she has received health policy and public health training from Harvard, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Research Scholars program. Dr. Wright has specific expertise in client engagement and received a NIMH-funded Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (F31) to examine shared decision making between Latinx parents and community therapists delivering evidence-based treatments to Medicaid-insured youth. She is currently a AHRQ T32 Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCLA Health Policy and Management Department and the RAND Corporation, where she conducts research on digital mental health tools and macro-level factors (e.g., funding; policy) influencing the sustainment of evidence-based treatments.
Elyse Tascione, MA
Lead Administrator
Elyse Tascione, MA, is a research associate and administrator for the MINDS Hub at the Center of Community Health in UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. She is currently the Project Manager for SB-82/833, a formative evaluation project examining the implementation of several Child/Youth and School-County Collaborative crisis triage programs across California. In collaboration with UC Davis, who leads the formative evaluation of Adult/TAY crisis triage programs, and through mixed methods, this evaluation provides lessons learned and evidence-based recommendations for future program implementation. When she is not at her desk, Elyse enjoys dancing, cooking, hiking, and spending time with her family.
Chrislie Ponce, BA BS
Staff Research Associate
Chrislie Ponce, B.S. B.A., is a Staff Research Associate II for the MINDS Hub at the Center of Community Health. Under the guidance of Dr. Juliet Edgcomb, she primarily works for the CSEP Project which aims to to develop methods to automate electronichealth record (EHR) cohort identification of children and adolescents newly presenting for suicide-related emergency department (ED) care. She is currently the project’s main reviewer of child and adolescent clinical notes employing the Columbia Classification Algorithm for Suicide Assessment (C-CASA), and contributing to the development of a classification manual. Beyond her professional endeavors, she enjoys exploring hiking spots in Los Angeles and spending quality time with her feline companion, Nina.