Susan Spieker is Director of the Center on Infant Mental Health and Development at the University of Washington, a partnership between the School of Nursing and the Center on Human Development and Disability.

Professor of Family and Child Nursing; Member of the Graduate Faculty; Adjunct Research Professor in Psychology; Contributing Faculty, Social Work Prevention Research Center; Affiliate, Center on Human Development and Disability.

Dr. Spieker directs the Birth to Three Lab in the Center for Infant Mental Health and Development. The lab is a resource for researchers interested in basic, applied, and clinical research with infants and their families.

Research
Dr. Spieker is Principal Investigator on a new $2.3 million award from the National Institute of Mental Health, Promoting Infant Mental Health in Foster Care. This five-year, community-based project in Pierce County, Washington, will test the effectiveness of the Promoting First Relationships training and intervention program with foster care toddlers and their careivers. Promoting Infant Mental Health in Foster Care is designed to build community capacity to deliver infant mental health interventions and services to foster families. It will include foster parents and kin caregivers (licensed and unlicensed) of toddlers who have experienced multiple placements in foster care, or who entered foster care for the first time after 10 months of age.

Teaching
Most recently, Dr. Spieker has taught graduate students in the Certificate Program in Infant Mental Health. She is a member of supervisory committees of doctoral students from several departments, including Nursing, Social Work, Speech and Hearing, Education, and Psychology.

Practice
Interwoven with her research on caregiving and child development in vulnerable populations has been Dr. Spieker's interest in strategies to prevent developmental delay and adverse socioemotional outcomes in children. In particular, she has studied how the childhood experiences of women involved in an Early Head Start intervention seems to influence the ease or difficulty they have in engaging in, and benefiting from, the intervention. Dr. Spieker plans to become more involved in preventive interventions for families with young children, particularly those designed to promote positive parent-child relationships and secure attachments