The Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship at Kelvin Smith Library has announced the selection of the 2022-23 Freedman Faculty Fellows. The annual fellowship program supports tenured or tenure-track faculty as well as clinical research faculty and aids these researchers in integrating digital tools and technology into their work across multiple disciplines to support learning and advance scholastic discoveries.

The 2022-23 Freedman Faculty Fellows program is generously funded by the Freedman Fellows Endowment, established by Samuel B. and Marian K. Freedman.

Anastasia Dimitropoulos

Anastasia Dimitropoulos is a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences studying cognitive and behavioral characteristics of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. Additionally, she serves as the director of the Schubert Center for Child Studies and the co-director of the childhood studies program. Much of her recent work is focused on designing an efficacious play-based intervention for children with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), a rare genetic disorder characterized by hyperphagia and food preoccupation, as well as several social cognitive and behavioral challenges that warrant intervention in early childhood.

The Play-based Remote Remote Enrichment To Enhance Development (PRETEND) program expansion project will use a web-based platform to disseminate the PRETEND Program for children with PWS. Previous results have indicated that this program is highly feasible and acceptable to parents and effectively improves children’s cognitive and affective play skills. The aim is to train a variety of play facilitators, from parents to professionals, through a web-based training platform to administer the PRETEND Program intervention, giving more families and clinicians access to one of very few behavioral interventions for children with PWS.