JeffreyRichardHolzbergMDMSc FAAP

Summary

• I am a community pediatrician, Director of Clinical Research, and Early Childhood Advocate with Chiricahua Community Health Centers, Inc. (CCHCI), a Federally Qualified Health Center on the US-Mexico border in Arizona. I became Director of Clinical Research after building CCHCI’s first research department after struggling to evaluate my own early childhood programs. Now we are evaluating multiple different clinical programs at CCHCI and I oversee a variety of IRB-approved projects and grants.
  
  In my role as early childhood advocate, I am particularly interested with how we empower parents to care for themselves and their newborns in the early years of life in an impoverished area that is under-resourced. I founded First Three, an early childhood curriculum to bring the neuroscience of early childhood development into the lives of families with newborns. First Three restructures well-child visits in the first three years of life to focus on normalization of stress, management strategies for stress in both the child and parent, the importance of communication through quality parent-child interactions, the mind-body connection, and parental self-care in a way that is time-efficient, easy-to-grasp, and evidence-based.
  
  
  Finally, I hired a community engagement coordinator in 2022 to help me start support groups for parents of children with autism. Over the past 1.5 years, over 30 parents of children with autism come together in support groups once monthly in English and Spanish. We also started monthly “Ask the Expert” education sessions and autism awareness events in the community, now training all instructional assistants in the school district on autism.