Morning Session II

Alanna Higgins Joyce, MD, MPH, MST, is an attending pediatrician in the Division of Hospital-Based Medicine at Lurie Children’s, caring for hospitalized children and newborns. She is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and has published and spoken nationally in the areas of medical education, faculty feedback, and curriculum development. 

Alanna holds an MD and an MPH from Tulane University and completed residency training in Pediatrics at the former Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. She has a Master of Science in Teaching and experience teaching middle-school science. Alanna earned her bachelor’s degree in cognitive science from Northwestern University. She is a mother of three boys and a lifelong ballet dancer.

Dr. Higgins Joyce sees patients at Lurie Children’s – main hospital location and Prentice Women’s Hospital at Northwestern Medicine.

Ravi Jhaveri, MD, FIDSA, FPIDS, FAAP, is the Division Head of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Lurie Children’s and Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.  

Prior to joining Lurie Children’s, he spent time on the faculty at both Duke and UNC School of Medicine.

Dr. Jhaveri’s research spans many aspects of Hepatitis C virus, with a particular focus on the burden, clinical outcomes, and treatment of HCV in infants, children, and pregnant women.   He currently serves on the AASLD/IDSA HCV Guidelines Panel as well as the AASLD Viral Hepatitis Elimination Task Force.  He also has an interest in vaccination of both healthy children and those with immunocompromised conditions. 

Dr. Jhaveri is a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. In addition, he is a Fellow of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, where he served on the PIDS Board of Directors from 2015-2019. Dr. Jhaveri is also the former Chair of the IDSA Standards and Practice Guidelines committee.

He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society (JPIDS) and formerly served as one of the Co-Editors-in-Chief for the journal Clinical Therapeutics.

Dr. Jhaveri sees patients at Lurie Children’s – main hospital location.

John T. Walkup, MD, is the Chair, of the Pritzker Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Lurie Children’s and a Professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. In addition, he is an Adjunct Professor in the Center for American Indian Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. 

Dr. Walkup’s work covers three main areas of innovation and investigation. His work with movement disorders, specifically Tourette syndrome, uniquely spans psychiatry, child psychiatry and neurology.  His expertise in child and adolescent psychiatry clinical trials focuses on the development and evaluation of psychopharmacological and psychosocial treatments and lastly, he has been involved in developing and evaluating interventions to reduce the large mental health disparities facing Native American youth, specifically drug use and suicide prevention. Over his career, Dr. Walkup has been awarded over $35 million in grants and contracts to support his research. Including current funding from Patient Centered Outcome Research Institute and the Kellogg Foundation.

Dr. Walkup is a consummate innovator and collaborator in developing and evaluating interventions for child and adolescent neurological and psychiatric disorders, and drug use suicide prevention. His capacity to apply research methodologies across numerous neuropsychiatric disorders and his extension of that skill to address mental health disparities in Native American youth make him a singularly unique contributor to psychiatry, neurology and public health.

He is one of only a few child and adolescent psychiatrists who have dedicated their career to research and clinical care of patients with Tourette syndrome. He is a past Chair of the Medical Advisory Board of the Tourette Association of America (TAA) and a current Director on the TAA Board of Directors. He has served the TAA in this and other capacities for over 30 years to reduce the disability associated with this neurological condition.

Over the past 25 years, Dr. Walkup in collaboration with others has been responsible for establishing the evidence base for the pharmacological and psychological treatment of the major childhood psychiatric disorders. This unique body of work has changed the face of child psychiatric care by establishing the standard of care for major depression in teens (March et al JAMA, 2004), childhood anxiety disorders (Pine, Walkup et al NEJM, 2001; Walkup et al., NEJM, 2008), bipolar disorder in young children (Geller et al., Arch Gen Psych, 2012; Walkup et al., 2016), suicidal teens (Brent et al., JAACAP, 2009) and Tourette syndrome (Piacentini et al., JAMA 2010; Wilhelm et al Arch Gen Psych, 2012). He was awarded a $6.2 million grant from Patient Centered Outcome Research Institute in 2020 for a large, multisite, randomized controlled trial to address the ongoing controversy regarding the relative importance of pharmacotherapy in improving remission rates in children with anxiety disorders. This year he and collaborators at Communities United were awarded $10 million from the Kellogg foundation to implement “Healing Through Justice” with 3000 youth in the City of Chicago.

Using his experience in developing and evaluating treatment for childhood neurological and psychiatric disorders he developed and evaluated the Family Spirit intervention to reduce mental health disparities in Native American youth specifically prevention of drug use risk in teen mothers and their infant children (Barlow et al., AJP 2013, 2014; Walkup et al., JAACAP, 2009), and youth suicidal behavior in adolescent and young adults (Cwik et al., Am J Pub Health, 2014 2011; Barlow et al., Am J Drug Alcohol Abuse, 2012; Mullany et al., Am J Pub Health 2010). The Family Spirit intervention initially studied in four reservation communities has been disseminated to 150 tribes nationwide and is one of the very few examples of a behavioral health research program becoming widely disseminated in a sustainable format in American Indian communities.  The suicide prevention program developed by the Johns Hopkins team is now disseminated to 155+ tribes in the US and was the subject of a recent presentation at the White House.  A recent paper Cwik MF et al., Decreases in Suicide Deaths and Attempts Linked to the White Mountain Apache Suicide Surveillance and Prevention System, 2001-2012. Am J Public Health. 2016 Dec;106(12):2183-2189 documented a ~50% reduction in suicide rates over the past decade of suicide prevention efforts.

For his work, he has been awarded four achievement awards for child and adolescent psychiatry from the major psychiatry and research organizations in the United States, the Norbert and Charlotte Rieger Award for Academic Achievement in 2009 from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Blanche F. Ittleson Award for Research in Child Psychiatry in 2011 from the American Psychiatric Association and the Schonfeld Award from the American Society of Adolescent Psychiatry in 2016. Lastly, in 2021 he was awarded the Ruane Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Research from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

His research has been published in major medical journals including JAMA and the NEJM, an unusual accomplishment for a child and adolescent psychiatrist.  Two of his papers Walkup et al., “Randomized controlled trial of a paraprofessional-delivered in-home intervention for young reservation-based American Indian mothers” JAACAP 2009; and Walkup JT “Antidepressant Efficacy for Depression in Children and Adolescents: Industry- and NIMH-Funded Studies” Am J Psychiatry 2017 were awarded “Paper(s) of the Year” by the respective journals. He has also served as a member of two National Academy (IOM) Committees on Developing Evidence-Based Standards for Psychosocial Interventions for Mental Disorders and Improving Health Outcomes for Children with Disabilities.

Dr. Walkup sees patients at Lurie Children’s main location. 

Tareq Yaqub, MD, currently serves as the Medical Director of Psychiatric Acute Care Services within the Pritzker Department of Psychiatry at Lurie Children’s. He is also an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where he also serves as the Associate Program Director for the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship. He was voted the department teacher of the year in 2023 and 2025.  

He completed medical school at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine. He then completed an adult psychiatry residency program at the Medical College of Wisconsin, followed by a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Michigan. During his training, he was the recipient of the inaugural Resident Excellence in Psychotherapy Award through Austen Riggs. He then became a fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association and concurrently completed further training through the Adult and Child/Adolescent Advanced Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Program at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute.  

He is involved in multiple initiatives dedicated to increasing access to mental health care for marginalized and vulnerable populations. He currently conducts forensic and diagnostic psychiatric evaluations for minors seeking asylum through the Forensic Assessment for Immigration Relief (FAIR) Clinic at Lurie Children’s. He also consults with pediatricians regarding optimizing mental health treatment for children through Lurie Children’s Mood, Anxiety, ADHD Collaborative Care (MAACC) clinic. He has presented regionally and nationally on various mental health topics, particularly pertaining to youth and feelings of “otherness.” In addition, he is involved in clinical trials exploring the efficacy of novel antipsychotics in youth with aggression and severe mental illness. He has no financial conflicts of interest to disclose. 

Dr. Yaqub sees inpatients and outpatients at Lurie Children’s main location including partial hospitalization.

Robert Berg, MD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and an inpatient child psychiatrist at Lurie Children's. 

He received a BA in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and his MD from Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He completed his residency in general psychiatry and fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, MD.

His clinical interests include acute psychiatric illness, psychosomatic and functional neurologic disorders, and comorbid chronic illnesses in psychiatric disease. 

Dr. Berg sees inpatients at Lurie Children’s main location.