Join the NJ ACTS Special Populations Core 2025 Seminar Series –   “The Impact of the Opioid Crisis on Infants, Children, and Adolescents” with Julie R. Gaither, PhD.

The presentation will provide an overview of how the pediatric community has been impacted by the opioid crisis. An overview of trends in pediatric morbidity and mortality related to opioids in general and fentanyl specifically will be provided. The talk will also present recent data related to the circumstances behind fatal pediatric opioid poisonings and the risk of maltreatment among infants, young children, and adolescents.

Dr. Gaither is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (General Pediatrics) and Public Health (Chronic Disease Epidemiology). She obtained her doctorate in epidemiology from the Yale School of Public Health in 2015. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in bioinformatics, she joined the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics. Her research focuses on the impact of the opioid crisis on vulnerable populations, work she began more than a decade ago as part of her dissertation research, for which she received a National Research Service Award from the NIH to study the association between opioid prescribing practices and all-cause mortality among U.S. veterans. In 2015, she began working on a project that allowed her to bridge her interests in adult medicine with that of pediatrics, which resulted in the first national publication to examine hospitalizations for opioid poisonings in children. She followed this work with the first national study to examine pediatric deaths from opioids. Prior to these publications, most of what was known about opioid-related morbidity and mortality came from the adult overdose literature. Her research has been supported by awards from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, the Patterson Trust, the Hood Foundation, and most recently, the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Register for the event: https://go.rutgers.edu/5almfux