Spotlight on Maternal Mental Health: Treatment and Research

Joy is the founder and executive director of 2020 Mom.  The mission of 2020 Mom is to close gaps in maternal mental health care, with a specific aim of ensuring all women are screened for maternal mental health disorders by their obstetric providers and offered a range of easy-to-access prevention and treatment options.

In addition to running 2020 Mom, Joy has worked for over 20 years for the fortune 50 healthcare company, Cigna, where she has gained in depth knowledge of the complex U.S. health delivery model.  She currently serves as the California compliance officer and has a passion for quality improvement and innovation. 

Joy is a member of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology expert work group on Maternal Mental Health and the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative executive committee. 

Joy has been recognized for her leadership and vision with various awards; most notably, receiving the "Emerging Leader" Award in Women's Health from the federal Health and Human Services Agency, Office of Women's Health.  This year Joy is being honored with the American Public Health Association's Outstanding Leadership in Advocacy Award for leading policy change in maternal mental health at the national and state level.

Dr. Catherine Monk is Professor of Medical Psychology in the Departments of Obstetrics & Gynecology (ObGyn), and Psychiatry, and Research Scientist VI at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Monk’s research brings together perinatal psychiatry, developmental psychobiology, and neuroscience to focus on the earliest influences on children’s developmental trajectories — those that happen in utero and how to intervene early to help women and prevent risk for mental health disorders in the future children. Dr. Monk earned her BA at Barnard, her PhD at the City University of New York, and completed her postdoctoral research training in the Psychobiological Sciences via a NIH T32 at Columbia University. Her research has been continuously funded by the NIH since she had her first support as a ‘K’ awardee in 2001; she also has received funding from the March of Dimes, Johnson & Johnson, the Robin Hood Foundation, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. Dr. Monk has been awarded key roles on the NIH-wide ECHO project, Environmental influences on Children’s Health Outcomes — a seven year, nationwide effort to study early factors, including women’s prenatal psychiatric illness and trauma histories, on children’s health outcomes across 50,000 participants. She is a PI on one ECHO project, Investigator on another, and elected by her peers to the ECHO Executive Committee. She is commencing a 5-year NIMH R01 MPI titled Intergenerational Transmission of Deficits in Self-Regulatory Control as well as continuing to direct a NICHD-funded intervention study Preventing Postpartum Depression: A Dyadic Approach Adjunctive to Obstetric Care. Dr. Monk is the founding director of the newly launched Women’s Mental Health program integrated into Columbia’s ObGyn Department.

Dr. Margaret Altemus, MD is a psychiatrist with expertise in the impact of hormonal changes on women's mental health.  She did her psychiatric residency at Yale University and research training at  the National Institute of Mental Health. She has a private practice on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and also is an Associate Professor at the Yale School of Medicine where she teaches and does research in women's mental health.  Dr. Altemus has extensive clinical and research experience in premenstrual mood disorders, pregnancy and postpartum conditions and menopause.

Dr. Briggs is National Director of HealthySteps. In this role, she is responsible for all aspects of the program’s operations, financial sustainability, evaluation and research, policy, model enhancements, and professional development and training.

She comes to this role after a successful career at Montefiore Health System in New York, where she grew the HealthySteps footprint from one to 21 practices, serving over 30,000 children annually. The Montefiore HealthySteps model informed the roll out of HealthySteps throughout New York State. Additionally, Dr. Briggs is the founder and former director of Pediatric Behavioral Health Services at Montefiore Medical Group, one of the largest integrated pediatric behavioral health services in the nation.

Dr. Briggs is the editor of Integrated Early Childhood Behavioral Health in Primary Care: A Guide to Implementation and Evaluation, published by Springer (2016) and the recipient of the 2018 Healthcare Delivery Award from the Academic Pediatric Association. She is Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Briggs completed her undergraduate work at Duke University (magna cum laude) and her doctoral work at New York University.