Mission
NPS will enable wide-scale access to a flexible, cost-effective mental health intervention, supported by technology, that keeps families together and tackles the youth mental health crisis. Key components of our Family Check-Up program include:
- Proven Effectiveness: Thirty years of dedicated research and independent studies have consistently shown that the program improves caregiver practices, strengthens familial bonds, and enhances children’s social, emotional, and academic success.
- Customized Goal Setting: Our in-person and online programs work with families to establish practical and long-term positive goals.
- Ongoing Support: We provide continuous guidance and resources to ensure lasting positive change.
Our Approach
Our approach is rooted in collaboration, empathy, and empowerment. Each family is unique, and we aim to foster working together to build upon existing strengths and identify improvement areas. Our non-judgmental and supportive methods are rooted in helping each family thrive.
Click to meet the Executive Governing Board
Our Team
Dr. Beth Stormshak
President & Founder
Dr. Beth Stormshak has been a faculty member at the University of Oregon for 25 years. Her research interests span the fields of both education and prevention science, including family-centered prevention of problem behavior, academic risk, and later mental health problems in children. Her work on the Family Check-Up® intervention model focuses on dissemination and implementation in community settings, as well as the development of an online version for wide-scale dissemination in community health settings and schools.
Dr. Lisa Reiter
Chief Operating Officer
& Chief Implementation Officer
Lisa Reiter has a PhD in Clinical Psychology and more than 25 years of experience working in the evidence-based practice field. Dr. Reiter worked at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina where she was involved in research projects that led to the development of the Coping Power model; she also conducted family therapy, supervised trainees, and supervised an MST (Multisystemic Therapy) team. She then moved to MST Services where she served in multiple roles, first as a trainer and then as Clinical Director for 15 years.
Celeste Edman,
Interim Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Lindsay Crow
Trainer & Implementation Consultant
Dr. Lindsay Crow is a licensed psychologist specializing inevidence-based care for children, adolescents, young adults, and their families. She has a PhD in Counseling Psychology from the University of Missouri and is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD. She has extensive experience implementing and providing training in Motivational Interviewing for use in clinical, community, and school-based settings. Lindsay lives in Columbia, MD with her family and greatly enjoys long distance running in her free time.
Justin Felt
Director of Software Development / Emberex
Justin has 12+ years of experience bringing products to market, including B2B apps supporting thousands of users. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Seattle Pacific University. For more information, see www.emberex.com/case-studies.
Dylan Fisher
Research Project Coordinator
Dylan Fisher is a research project coordinator with 7+ years of coordination experience on a variety of NIH supported projects. Most recently with the University of Washington, he worked on a nationwide NIMH-supported research study that aimed to implement a lay volunteer delivered intervention for depression in senior centers. Dylan received a BS in psychology and a minor in nonprofit administration from the University of Oregon. Outside work, Dylan enjoys climbing, spending time with his two dogs, Otis and Luna, and exploring the outdoors.
Dr. Kate Hails
Trainer & Implementation Consultant
With a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh, Kate has experience applying the Family Check-Up with over 100 families and helped implement the FCU in an Early Head Start program in Pittsburgh, both on the planning end and as an FCU interventionist. Kate was also involved in some of the early stages of planning of the Pittsburgh Study, a community-partnered research initiative that is offering the FCU to 5,000 families in Western Pennsylvania as part of a tiered preventive intervention approach.
Chris Hazen Board Secretary & Advisor,
Corporate Development, Co-Founder
Chris Hazen is passionate about prevention and served as COO and CFO of Northwest Prevention Science from founding until the end of 2023. Prior to o-founding NPS, Chris established and grew high-performance teams of technical professionals across the US and Asia in the environmental, health, safety and energy services industries from 1996 to 2018, providing advice and training on preventing human and environmental harm to many of the largest industrial corporations in the world.
Dr. Anne Marie Mauricio
Trainer & Implementation Consultant
Anne Marie Mauricio Northwest Prevention Science.jpg
Dr. Mauricio is an Associate Research Professor and Family Intervention Scientist at the Prevention Science Institute. She has more than 15 years of experience working with communities to develop, implement, and evaluate culturally competent evidence-based interventions. Her research and practice interests focus on the translation of evidence-based interventions for sustainable delivery in real-world settings. Her research has focused on examining how implementation processes function collectively to influence each other and outcomes and on understanding contextual factors that influence heterogeneity in intervention responsiveness and how this heterogeneity links to intervention outcomes. She is also a licensed psychologist with extensive experience working with families and children in community settings, and she has trained and supervised 100s of clinicians in the Family Check-Up® and Everyday Parenting© interventions in the US and internationally
Dr. Anna Cecilia McWhirter
Trainer & Implementation Consultant
Dr. Anna Cecilia McWhirter is a bilingual licensed psychologist and graduated from the School Psychology doctoral program at the University of Oregon with a specialization in Spanish Language Psychological Services and Research. She has extensive experience providing the Family Check-Up and Family Check-Up Online with children and families in English and Spanish, as well as facilitating intervention groups focused on parenting, social-emotional skills, and emotion regulation, conducting psychodiagnostic and behavioral assessment, and consultation. Her research focuses on the development and implementation of the Family Check-Up, parenting behaviors in diverse populations, parent mental health and wellbeing, adolescent emotion regulation, and the use of effective observational and clinical tools.
Dane Ramshaw
Interim Chief Technology Officer
Dane Ramshaw is an educational technologist, with over 20 years experience developing tools and platforms. He has been a faculty member at the University of Oregon for 9 years, and is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Global and Online Education at the College of Education. As a team leader and project manager, Dane has developed technological and pedagogical solutions for K12 teachers, higher education practitioners and healthcare professionals. Dane has acted as technology lead on several large scale research projects, in partnership with organizations such as the CDC, i3, Gates Foundation, SRI, NIDILRR, Oregon Department of Education, Seattle Children’s Hospital, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. As a consultant Dane has advised and provided technology expertise for various start-ups, small businesses and non-profits; acting as liaison between stakeholders; analyzing and improving codebases and processes, building professional learning communities, and planning for effective delivery. Dane is regularly brought in to projects to help ‘GTD’ (Get Things Done).
Alyssa Schneider
General Manager
Alyssa Schneider has years of professional experience working as an executive assistant to manage daily organizational needs and ongoing projects. She has extensive project management skills, including organizational skills, goal planning and execution, and coordinating with multiple groups of people. Alyssa combines a spirit of collaboration and efficient project management to help organizations move forward. Along with this skill set, she also has a family with three lovely children who keep her busy when she isn’t working and has had the privilege of being married to a native Spanish speaker which has allowed her own Spanish speaking skills to continually develop.
Psalm Sebastian
Project & Training Coordinator
Psalm has a proven track record of completing projects on time and with great accuracy. She brings a background of high attention to detail, organizational skills, and customer service from her varied career to the role of Project Coordinator at NPS. She enjoys checking off her to-do list, communicating effectively, and collaborating with others. She and her husband have two young children and live in North Carolina.
Dr. Jenna Stapleton
Trainer & Implementation Consultant
Dr. Jenna Stapleton is a licensed psychologist specializing in health psychology and evidence-based practices. She has implemented the Family Check-Up intervention across multiple age groups. In her previous role as a family interventionist and implementation scientist, she provided the FCU to families of children entering Kindergarten across several elementary schools with a focus on enhancing the partnership between parents and teachers to promote school success. The other large research study she worked on focused on families of older children entering young adulthood and utilizing the FCU in the prevention of risk behavior. Jenna has a doctoral degree in Counseling Psychology and a master’s degree in Couple and Family Therapy from the University of Oregon. She currently works as an assistant professor and practicing psychologist in Oregon. She enjoys spending time with her family and the beautiful changing seasons of Oregon.
Milagra Tyler
Project Manager – Family Checkup Online
Milagra Storm Tyler has a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and a Masters of Arts in Teaching. For the past 20 years she has helped develop and evaluate Internet-delivered behavioral change interventions, and has primarily focused on information architecture and user engagement.