Frank Grijlava, MSCC, MPH
Director: Midwest Trauma Services Network
Frank came through the California system as a child adopted into a family challenged with mental health and substance abuse issues. Raised in the East Bay area of Northern California Frank attended 9 different schools in his first 9 years. Raised in a challenging home in a challenging environment both geographically and historically, Frank has a unique perspective that translates for many of our most traumatized communities, families and children. Frank negotiated his way into the military and his first professional training was as a special warfare diver attached to the Marine Mammal program of the United States Navy where he spent 8 years honing behavior modification skills, stress management and understanding the dynamics of nonverbal communication. Later, as a stay at home dad for 2 kids and a student of psychology he became aware of and struggled with development, his own trauma exposure, and behavioral progressions and sequencing. This led to a journey of self-exploration and an academic focus on psychological trauma.
Frank has worked with the International Trauma Center since 1999 and deployed to Ground Zero to manage a team of clinicians working with a federal agency in “the dig” to stabilize them ongoing as they did their difficult work. Frank also worked extensively throughout Louisiana and Mississippi in the aftermath of Katrina. Frank has worked abroad in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, Nepal, Jordan, Haiti and several other countries for agencies like Save the Children, USAID, the World Bank and the International Center for the Protection of Victims of Torture to develop interventions and train clinicians working with children.
As Director of the Midwest Trauma Services Network and senior vice president of programming for the International Trauma Center he has spent the last several years introducing and training selected trauma informed evidence based practices as well as designing and implementing innovations specific to people from at-risk environments through the OJJDP. Frank currently consults in several states for trauma in schools, foster and adoptive parents, community change through trauma informed care and provides direct psychoeducation and coaching to complexly traumatized children and families. Frank has a BS in disaster psychology with an emphasis on mental health, an MS in Public Health with a focus on child mental health and an MS in clinical counseling with trauma theory as the primary theoretical framework. Frank is the proud father of two gifted and resilient college students who are also interested in human services. His mission is to create a world that understands the impact of trauma and abuse on children, families, communities and culture by teaching, challenging and learning everywhere he goes.
Karen Zilberstein, MSW, LICSW
Karen Zilberstein, MSW, LICSW is a psychotherapist and Clinical Director of the Western Massachusetts chapter of A Home Within, a national nonprofit providing pro bono psychotherapy to individuals who experienced foster care. She is also a researcher who has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles on attachment, trauma, and various aspects of working with children and families in the child welfare system. Her narrative nonfiction book, Parents under pressure: Struggling to raise children in an unequal America, won two 2019 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. A forthcoming book on working with children and families in foster care will be published by Guilford Press in 2026. For her work in the child welfare field, she was awarded the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute Angel in Adoption Award in 2025.
Shamra Boel-Studt, PhD, MSW
Shamra Boel-Studt, PhD, MSW, is an Associate Professor at the Florida State University College of Social Work and Director of the IQCS, with over 20 years of experience in practice, research, training, and evaluation focused on children with high-acuity behavioral health needs. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Coe College and both a MSW and PhD in Social Work from the University of Iowa. Her expertise lies in strengthening service quality, care coordination, and family engagement within child service systems with an emphasis on out-of-home care settings, using mixed-methods, data-driven quality improvement approaches and advanced quantitative methods. She has extensive experience partnering with state agencies and community providers to design, implement, and evaluate evidence-informed services. Dr. Boel-Studt has led the development of validated quality assessment tools, managed and evaluated multi-site initiatives, and translated evaluation findings into actionable practice innovations and policy initiatives. With 43 peer-reviewed publications and a track record as Principal Investigator on numerous funded projects, she leverages deep subject matter expertise to lead multidisciplinary teams in delivering high-impact, translational research.
Candice Selwyn, PhD
Dr. Candice Selwyn earned her PhD in Clinical Counseling Psychology from the University of South Alabama in 2016, during which she completed an accredited internship at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, GA and received specialized training in the Psychology of Women. She subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship focused on promoting resilience and integrated healthcare initiatives and served as the Women's Mental Health and Trauma Services Coordinator at the Gulf Coast Behavioral Health and Resiliency Center until she joined the College of Nursing at the University of South Alabama in 2019. Dr. Selwyn is presently an Associate Professor of Research in the College of Nursing where her work continues to focus on improving the health and wellbeing of women and children along the Gulf Coast, particularly those that have experienced interpersonal violence. She currently leads a campus-based program aimed at preventing and responding to interpersonal violence amongst college students, and consults with several other grant-funded initiatives aimed at improving the healthcare system's response to the unique needs of women and children in the region.