Collaborative START Lab TEAM | UC Davis MIND Institute

Vanessa Avila-Pons is the Treatment and Training Manager for the Collaborative Start Lab at the UC Davis MIND Institute. Vanessa has over 15 years of clinical experience working with children with autism and their families. Vanessa has worked at the MIND Institute since 2008, where she has delivered evidence-based treatments and has led treatment teams across several Autism Center for Excellence (ACE) grants. Vanessa is the Social Work faculty member for the Northern California LEND (Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities) Program, where she helps build community partnerships and oversees community engagement for trainees. Vanessa is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and received her master's degree in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Latino Counseling from Santa Clara University. Vanessa is also a certified therapist, parent coach, and senior trainer of the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM).

Rachel Balitsky is the Team Leader for the Connecting the Dots Study and ESDM MIND Clinic program. In her role as a Team Leader, Rachel is responsible for the oversight of ESDM treatment programs, supervision of RBTs, and delivery of parent coaching. Rachel has 15 years of experience working with children with autism. Rachel is both a certified ESDM Lead Trainer and certified ESDM Parent Coach. In her role on the ESDM training program, Rachel conducts several ESDM trainings a year and delivers parent training to parents of young children with autism. Rachel has a master’s degree in Teaching with an emphasis in Applied Behavior Analysis and is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. 

Amanda is a Clinical Research Coordinator for the Partnerships for Autism: Learning More to improve Services (PALMS) Study. She has worked at the UC Davis MIND Institute for 8 years on multiple research studies, mostly within the Collaborative START Lab. Amanda has years of experience in delivering evidence-based naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBI), such as the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), to infants and toddlers on the autism spectrum. In her current role as the Clinical Research Coordinator, Amanda is responsible for recruiting and enrolling participants into the study. She also oversees data collection and study surveys. In addition, Amanda aids in managing the intern program for the Collaborative START Lab. Amanda received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from California State University, Sacramento.

Walter Cervantes is the Case Coordinator and Senior Interventionist at the UC Davis MIND Institute for the ESDM MIND Clinic Program. Walter has a B.F.A. and is a Registered Behavior Technician. Walter has over 14 years of experience working with children with autism in both Spanish, and English. Walter has worked at the MIND Institute since 2011, where he has delivered evidence-based treatments and has delivered treatment to various children across several Autism Center for Excellence (ACE) grants. Walter has experience using various methods of intervention such as Discrete Trial Teaching and the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM). Walter’s primary role is to design and implement children’s interventions using the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM). In addition, Walter also assists in the ongoing supervision and training of new and current interventionists. Walter is a designated approved translator for the EPICC Study.  

Sarah Dufek Ph.D., BCBA-D, is an associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She is a licensed psychologist and board-certified behavior analyst specializing in diagnostic assessment and intervention services for autistic individuals across the lifespan. She has special expertise in caregiver coaching and naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBIs). She has been working with children, adolescents, and adults with autism and related developmental disabilities in clinical and research contexts since 2000. Dr. Dufek's research interests focus on the development and community implementation of high-quality evidence-based assessment and intervention practices for individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities with a special emphasis on services designed for families who historically have not had access to feasible and acceptable options.​

Amber Fitzgerald the Director of Education Initiatives and a Project Manager at the UC Davis MIND Institute. She has a Master’s Degree in Special Education, holds an Education Specialist teaching credential for students with moderate to severe disabilities, and is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. Amber has worked with families and neurodiverse individuals for the past 25 years in a variety of settings. Amber manages the Mind the Gap program through the Autism Intervention Research Network on Behavioral Health (AIR-B 4) grant, working with community agencies to support families with newly diagnosed children understand how to access services. In addition, Amber is a certified trainer for Classroom Pivotal Response Teaching (CPRT) as well as a certified trainer for Project ImPACT, an early intervention parent-coaching intervention. She is a member of the UC Davis MIND Institute ECHO team, a tele-mentoring program that connects a multidisciplinary team of autism experts at the UC Davis MIND Institute with providers in remote locations. As a member of the Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (CEDD) team, Amber coordinates training for the PATH Program, Promoting Accessibility to Healthcare, and the Medical Module Course (Intellectual & Developmental Disability in the Community), a joint effort between the CEDD and the UC Davis School of Medicine. Amber is also one of the coordinators of the annual MIND Summer Institute conference.

Deeniece Hatten has worked at the UC Davis MIND Institute for 13 years and is currently the ESDM Training Program and ESDM Treatment Clinic manager in the Collaborative START Lab. As the Program Manager, Ms. Hatten oversees ESDM certifications, workshops, and day-to-day operations. She is also the primary liaison for all families participating in the ESDM Treatment Clinic and Connecting the Dots study. Deeniece has earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology from the California State University, Sacramento. Ms. Hatten is currently working on her master’s degree in sociology. She is researching the effects of language used in Black households and its impact on socio-economic status.

Cynde Katherine Josol earned her doctoral degree in Special Education at Michigan State University. For the past 10 years, she has worked with individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities in school, clinical, and research lab settings. Her primary research interest is to understand and improve the social outcomes of individuals with disabilities using both qualitative and quantitative research methods, with a specific focus on identifying and addressing the factors that can impede development and maintenance of positive friendships. Her published work includes an examination of a video feedback intervention to improve the empathy skills of autistic adolescents and a phenomenological study exploring factors that impede and facilitate friendships between adults with and without disabilities. She is a postdoctoral trainee in the Collaborative START lab with a focus on implementation science and community-based research using culturally relevant methods and practices.

Lourdes works as a coordinator for the TEDI and TEAMS Studies that are both in the Collaborative START Lab. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in psychology and volunteered in research labs. After that, she became an intern at the Collaborative START Lab where she observed videos of teachers implementing CPRT in the classroom and coded their fidelity for the TEAMS Study. Her main research focus is finding ways to use evidence-based practices to support individuals on the autism spectrum and their families, particularly those from underserved communities. She enjoys baking and growing various plants in her garden

Deepinder is a clinical research coordinator in the Collaborative START Lab. After completing his undergraduate and masters at UC Davis, he has been involved in clinical research targeted around finding novel interventions for depression and anxiety. Some of Deepinder’s research interests are depression and anxiety and finding culturally specific interventions for both at the community level and individual level. He is also passionate about breaking down the stigma surrounding autism and other disorders. In his free time, Deepinder is usually playing sports, lifting, exploring nature or trying out new food spots.

Marie Rocha is the manager of both the Early Start Laboratory and the ESDM Training Program. Dr. Rocha’s primary responsibility as lab manager is to provide support and supervision for all of the research study teams under the direction of Sally Rogers and Aubyn Stahmer. As the manager of the ESDM Training Program, she provides oversight for all of the ESDM training workshops and all certified therapists, trainers and parent coaches worldwide. The goals of the ESDM Training program are  to make the evidence based practices of the ESDM accessible to organizations and professionals working directly with young children with autism and their families through workshops and the certification programs, and to provide organization and support for certified ESDM therapists, parent coaches and trainers throughout the world. She is a certified ESDM therapist, parent coach and senior trainer, leading multiple training workshops annually. In addition to her extensive training in ESDM, she has over 15 years of experience using behaviorally based, empirically validated, autism intervention methods in a variety of community settings. As a board-certified behavior analyst and experienced clinical supervisor, she provides ongoing behavior analytic supervision to the clinical team. Her research to date has focused on developing and evaluating naturalistic behavior analytic techniques, including parent education models. Her clinical experience includes supervising home and school-based behavioral intervention programs in both research and community settings. She received her master’s degree and doctorate in Psychology at the University of California, San Diego and has worked with Sally Rogers since 2008.

Sally Rogers specializes in conducting developmental and treatment research into autism and other developmental disabilities and working with children with developmental disabilities and their families, especially young children with autism. She studies early developmental processes, including imitation, social-communicative behavior, development of motor skills, language, and social interaction patterns. She is currently focused on developing and improving treatments for early autism using a treatment model that she developed in collaboration with Geraldine Dawson, the Early Start Denver Model. Her efforts to deliver effective interventions to people with autism and their families takes her to places all over the globe, training therapists use ESDM in. She is the primary scientist of a number of federal grants, including an NIH funded ACE Network grant involving a multisite randomized clinical trial comparing ESDM and discrete trial interventions, a study focused on how to help parents use ESDM techniques at home to improve their children's language and behavior, and a large postdoctoral training grant that she directs with David Amaral. Her clinical interests include evaluation of cognitive, behavioral, social, emotional, and adaptive functioning; early intervention for children with autism; developing treatment and educational interventions for persons with autism of all ages, and social skills groups for adults with autism. She has written extensively in her field, authoring numerous articles and books and developing training videos. She serves on the editorial board of many publications, including Autism Research, the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, and Infants and Young Children. She also reviews for many journals, including Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Science, American Journal of Mental Retardation, Journal of Early Intervention, Journal of Child Psychology and Child Psychiatry, and Development and Psychopathology.

Aubyn Stahmer is an associate professor in Psychiatry from a similar position at UC San Diego. Aubyn received her Ph.D. under Dr. Laura Schreibman at UCSD and has spent her research career developing and testing interventions for young children with autism, developing integrated toddler day programs, testing improvements in public school classrooms that support children with autism, and conducting dissemination and implementation studies of empirically supported treatments in community settings. She is a licensed psychologist and a board-certified behavior analyst with expertise in Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT), and Early Start Denver Model, and a wide range of other interventions as well. She is widely considered to be one of the most experienced intervention researchers in autism, with a host of publications and a recently published text on use of PRT in public school settings with children with autism.

Meagan Talbott is a developmental psychologist and an Assistant Professional Researcher in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She received her Ph.D. from Boston University and subsequent T32-funded post-doctoral training through the Autism Research Training Program at the UC Davis MIND Institute. Dr. Talbott’s research focuses on early communication and language development in infants at-risk and toddlers with autism, with the overall goal of improving early identification and targeted treatments. Her current research projects include an NIH-funded project developing a distance-based telehealth screener and assessment of ASD symptoms and infant development and a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant examining neurobiological correlates of communication development in toddlers with autism participating in early intervention studies.

Sarah Vejnoska is a postdoctoral scholar at the UC Davis MIND Institute. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from Davis in 2022. Her doctoral dissertation, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, focused on studying the essential components of interventions designed to help toddlers on the autism spectrum and how caregivers can best support their toddlers. She has more than ten years of experience working on research projects that partner with community members and aim to improve quality of life for individuals on the autism spectrum and their families. Her interests include bringing evidence-based practices to underserved communities and implementing effective neurodiversity-affirming interventions.

Yue Yu is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and a licensed clinical psychologist at the MIND Institute and UC Davis Health. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis and completed her clinical psychology internship at Charleston Consortium - Medical University of South Carolina, and her postdoctoral training at the UC Davis MIND Institute. She is a recipient of the Clinical and Translational Science Center TL1 grant and the 2023/2024 IDDRC pilot grant, through which she examines the effectiveness of a novel family/friend network program in improving caregiver engagement in early interventions in under-resourced families. She has over 10 years of experience working with children with autism and their families in both research and clinical contexts. She provides training on Mind the Gap and Project ImPACT, two evidence-based interventions, through the Autism Intervention Research Network on Behavioral Health Study and BRIDGE: Project ImPACT for Toddlers Study in the Collaborative START Lab.