Parisa Parsafar, Ph.D., joined OHE in 2023 as a program officer and liaison with NICHD’s Division of Extramural Research (DER). She works across DER to advance scientific workforce diversity and health equity research and leads OHE’s outreach and engagement efforts to increase inclusion and representation in research.
Dr. Parsafar joined NICHD in 2020 as a Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Federal Executive Branch Policy Fellow with DER, where she worked to advance NICHD’s health equity portfolio through the STrategies to enRich Inclusion and achieVe Equity initiative. Through a later role with the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term® Initiative (NIH HEAL Initiative®), she led projects and initiatives to increase the impact of NIH HEAL research and make it more inclusive, accessible, and relevant to the communities it is meant to serve.
Prior to joining NIH, Dr. Parsafar completed an SRCD Federal Congressional Policy Fellowship, working in Congress with a diverse range of policymakers, scientific and professional societies, and community and advocacy organizations to address disparities and promote health equity for children and families through advancing federal health and education policy.
Dr. Parsafar has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside) in developmental psychology with an emphasis on emotion-cognition connections across childhood in the context of understanding mental health conditions. Her previous program of research focused on children’s exposure to negative emotional situations and the broader health-related consequences for how they manage them. During her graduate training, she focused on increasing the impact of research and making it more relevant to communities by helping to launch the UC Riverside Science-to-Policy Certificate Program. The program was designed to give Ph.D. students within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programs the training they needed to broaden the application of their research and connect it to public policy.
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