Judith R. Mathews

Background

About Judith R. Mathews

I was originally trained as a teacher of deaf-blind children and then expanded my training to child psychology. I worked for most of my career in medical settings as a pediatric psychologist, serving children ages 0-18 and their families. Areas of specialization include: common childhood behavior disorders, anxiety disorders, trauma and PTSD, disabilities, adolescent girls,adjustment disorders, low income/low literacy families in both rural and urban settings and chronic illness (pediatric pain, medical adherence, diabetes, feeding disorders. I helped develop an extensive network of integrated behavioral health in pediatric practices, both urban and rural, throughout the state of Nebraska. In 2010, I received my Master's in Public Health with an emphasis on global public health and community-based participatory research (CBPR). I developed a CBPR curriculum for adolescent girls and implemented this curriculum three times with at-risk girls at Girls Inc. at Omaha (projects the girls selected included lead poisoning prevention, child abuse prevention, and heath/fitness) and twice in Nairobi Kenya while on a Fulbright Scholarship. I continue to advised the girls in the Nairobi slum of Kibera. I moved to Baltimore in 2013 to obtain services for a family member, where I shifted my focus from clinical work to public health. My primary emphasis has been in doing advocacy and training work with National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) at a local and state level. Recently, I completed an addendum to their Family-to-Family course, to include trauma and co-occurring substance use disorders. I have also supervised ABA students in the Department of Education at Johns Hopkins University. For family reasons, I will be moving to Atlanta in the spring of 2017. It is my hope that I can continue my public health work I, but also pursue part-time work in the areas of applied behavior analysis and clinical child psychology.