Over the past two decades, Dr. Kassam-Adams has led a research program focused on understanding how children and families respond to potentially traumatic events — such as medical emergencies, injury, and violence — and on developing secondary prevention protocols which can be integrated in pediatric healthcare settings or delivered broadly via the web.

She leads an international data archive of child trauma studies, a collaborative effort which aims to advance data sharing and enable integrative cross-study analyses. She also directs the Center for Pediatric Traumatic Stress, which provides training and resources for trauma-informed pediatric healthcare across the United States. She is a past president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and has been appointed to several national and international expert consensus groups on child traumatic stress.

Among her notable career achievements, Dr. Kassam-Adams:

• Leads a program of translational research (federally-funded since 1997) examining child and parent post-traumatic stress reactions, delineating prevalence and etiological mechanisms, and developing and evaluating theoretically grounded intervention models
• Serves as a national thought leader in defining the concept and practice of “trauma-informed” pediatric healthcare
• Leads an international collaboration creating a unique research resource in the traumatic stress field — a growing data archive of prospective child trauma studies that promotes integrative cross-study analyses