Dr Melanie Barwick, PhD, CPsych is Senior Associate Scientist in the Community Health Systems Resource Group, Department of Psychiatry, at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada.  Affiliated with both the Sickkids’ Learning and Research Institutes, she is Scientific Director of Knowledge Translation within the Child Health Evaluative Sciences program of the Research Institute.  She holds appointments as Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.  Her program of research in implementation science and knowledge translation spans health, mental health, education, and global health sectors (www.melaniebarwick.com).  She leads a technical support team for 100 service provider organizations, supporting Ontario’s outcome measurement initiative for child and youth mental health for the Ministry of Child and Youth Services. She provides training in knowledge translation internationally through the Scientist Knowledge Translation Training™ (for researchers) and the Knowledge Translation Professional Certificate™ (for KT practitioners) courses (http://bit.ly/dc2L1R).  She consults to government and service providers in the child and youth mental health sector and was, until recently, a contributor to Weekly Check Up on the CBC Health website.

Dr Patricia Chamberlain is a Senior Research Scientist and the Science Director at the Oregon Social Learning Center. Dr. Chamberlain developed the Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC) and KEEP intervention models.  MTFC is an alternative to group, residential, and institutional placement for children and adolescents with severe behavioral and mental health problems. KEEP provides support and parenting skills to foster and kinship parents in regular state-supported foster care homes.  She has been the Principal Investigator on nine randomized clinical trials examining the feasibility, efficacy, effectiveness, and implementation of community-based intervention approaches.  Dr. Chamberlain has authored three books and more than 80 journal articles and book chapters on evidence-based treatment approaches, treatment process, outcome research, methodology, foster care, implementation, and related topics. A particular area of interest has been in implementing evidence-based practices in real world child public service systems. She recently completed a two-state study where 53 counties are randomly assigned to one of two models of implementation for scaling up MTFC.  The study involved developing and testing a measure of implementation success/failure. In 2007, she received the Science to Practice Award from the Society for Prevention (SPR) Research and in 2013 she was made a SPR Fellow. In addition to treatment development and implementation, her research interests include gender influences on outcomes for adolescents and young adults, and methods for collecting "real time" data on child functioning in public service system settings. She is currently involved in a foster care system reform effort in New York City and the Director of a National Institute of Drug Abuse Center of Excellence.

Brian Head is a Professorial Research Fellow in public policy in the Institute for Social Science Research, University of Queensland.

Brian had 13 years’ experience in senior executive roles with the Queensland Government, and two years as the CEO of ARACY, before returning to academia in 2007.

His current research interests include evidence-based policy in theory and practice, program evaluation, collaboration to address ‘wicked’ policy challenges, and issues around better governance and accountability. He works across many problem areas including social well-being and environmental sustainability. He is especially interested in how research can better contribute to policy-making, and how to improve the impacts of policy-relevant research.

His report on How Government Agencies Use Evidence (2013) is available at: http://apo.org.au/research/how-do-government-agencies-use-evidence?utm

Jo Rycroft-Malone is Professor of Implementation Research and University Director of Research, Bangor University , UK

Jo is a Professor of Health Services and Implementation Research and Head of School: Healthcare Sciences at Bangor University – a multi-disciplinary school that incorporates teaching and learning, research and impact and enterprise activities. Her expertise and programme of work is concerned with implementation research and knowledge translation within health services. Over the past 6 years and with colleagues she has developed an internationally recognised Implementation Research programme at Bangor University (Implement@Bangor), including the development of the first Professional Doctorate in Implementation.

Jo holds significant competitive research funding from National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Medical Research Council, EU FP7 and Canadian Institutes for Health Research to explore both the processes and outcomes of implementation and improvement through mixed methods research. Over the last 15 years she has been working with colleagues on the development, refinement and testing of the Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services (PARIHS) framework: one approach to conceptualising the successful implementation in evidence in practice.

Jo sits on a number of international and national and strategy development 'think tanks' and funding groups, including the English Chief Medical Officer's 'Clinical Effectiveness Research Agenda Group,' the NIHR's Health Services and Delivery Research Programme commissioning board (Deputy Chair), Knowledge Mobilisation Fellowship Scheme, and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research's Evidence Synthesis grant committee. Jo is an editorial board member of BMC Implementation Science, and previously the inaugural editor of Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing (2003-2013), and an associate editor of BMC Trials. In 2012, Jo was appointed as Chair of the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence's (NICE) Implementation Strategy Group.

Bryan Samuels is the Executive Director of Chapin Hall, one of the US’s leading research and policy centers focused on improving the well-being of children and youth, families, and their communities.  Before joining Chapin Hall, Samuels was appointed by President Barack Obama as Commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families (ACYF), making him from 2010-2013 the highest-ranking federal child welfare policymaker in the country.  As ACYF Commissioner, he emphasized the importance of child well-being and the use of data-driven approaches to improve the welfare of vulnerable children and youth.  Samuels has over twenty years of experience in child welfare, including having served as the Chief of Staff of Chicago Public Schools under Arne Duncan and as Director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.  He was also a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration from 1997 to 2003. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.