Sheree L. Toth, associate director of Mt. Hope Family Center, has been appointed its acting director following the announcement that Dante Cicchetti will join the faculty of the University of Minnesota and its Institute of Child Development in Minneapolis.
Toth has worked collaboratively with Cicchetti for nearly two decades. She is a national leader in the field of developmental psychopathology and is particularly interested in continuing her work on developing and evaluating prevention and intervention programs for high-risk children and families. Toth, who is associate professor in the Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology at the University of Rochester, also is invested in working to export evidence-based treatments into the broader clinical community.
Cicchetti, Mt. Hope’s director since 1985 and the Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Pediatrics at the University of Rochester, will hold the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair and the Harris Endowed Chair in the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. He also will assume the directorship of a major interdisciplinary center involving collaboration between the University of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis. Cicchetti will maintain a relationship with Mt. Hope and intends to conduct research there in the future.
Mt. Hope Family Center is a program of the University of Rochester’s Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology. The center, which is located in the Corn Hill neighborhood, was established in 1979 and has grown from a staff of 10 to 80 full-time employees and more than 30 undergraduate and graduate student part-time employees. It provides evidence-based therapeutic services to at-risk children and families, conducts state-of-the-art research investigations in the areas of child maltreatment, child development, domestic violence, and mental health, and trains future practitioners and research scientists.
“Dante made Mt. Hope Family Center an exceptional program for families in the Rochester area, and it is now a research center of importance across the nation,” said Thomas J. LeBlanc, the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the College Faculty. “He created a strong program that will continue into the future.”