Pat Hudak, president of CHADD’s board of directors, presents the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award to Dr. Larry Jones during the Annual International Conference on ADHD.

Each year, CHADD presents a series of awards honoring outstanding service and dedication to the ADHD community. In 2022, these awards were presented during the Annual International Conference on ADHD, co-hosted by CHADD, ADDA, and ACO. New this year was the Early Career Influencer Award, the first award presented jointly by all three organizations. Other honors have been a CHADD tradition for decades, including the Hall of Fame, Lifetime Achievement, Young Scientist, Educator of the Year, Chapter of the Year, and Volunteer Leader awards.

Conceived and planned as a hybrid event for the first time in its history, in-person attendees gathered in Dallas, Texas, from November 17-19, 2022. Those choosing the virtual option attended from anywhere in the world, enjoying a carefully selected lineup of outstanding sessions. This combination made #ADHD2022 truly the largest ADHD event of the year.

Congratulations to all, along with CHADD’s deep gratitude for their dedication to people affected by ADHD.

2022 CHADD Hall of Fame Award

Ingrid Alpern, JD, LLM

Through her long-term work as a CHADD volunteer and as a Parent to Parent teacher, Ingrid Alpern has helped to raise awareness and provide support to families coping with ADHD. After serving on the board of her local chapter in Montgomery County, Maryland, she served on CHADD’s national board of directors. Alpern has been co-chair of CHADD’s public policy committee for more than a decade. She also serves on the organization’s finance committee.

Larry Jones, MD, MBA, AACC

A retired pediatrician, Dr. Larry A. Jones studied at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and then transferred to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he received his medical degree. He completed his pediatric residency, genetics fellowship, and MBA in executive healthcare management at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

After his medical training and postgraduate education, Dr. Jones remained in St. Louis, where he opened a general pediatrics office in 1981 including a specialty in children’s learning disabilities, specifically, ADHD. He became more involved in treating children with ADHD after he and his three sons were diagnosed with the genetic, brain-based syndrome. Since then he has been proactive in bringing awareness about ADHD to public health officials, hospital administrators, and physicians. Dr. Jones served as the chief administrator for childhood lead poisoning and all other child and maternal health activities for the city of St. Louis. Most notably, he coordinated the treatments for childhood lead poisoning, a known cause of childhood ADHD, to help the city government, insurance companies, and hospitals improve and manage their remediation efforts.

During his twenty-five years of working in private practice and after he left his practice, Dr. Jones spent nearly twenty years in healthcare administration, including serving as chief medical officer for a hospital and a health plan. For ten years he served as a physician advisor for hospitals in St. Louis, and most recently served in that capacity in Charlotte, North Carolina, prior to his retirement. He helped hospital administrators maintain their patients’ quality of care by managing their healthcare compliance and reimbursement, while promoting patient advocacy. He is a member of WIE Champions, a local multi-diverse group of Charlotte men promoting open discussions on race and culture; serves on the board of directors for NAMI Charlotte; and several ministries at Friendship, MBC, including social justice. With his wife, Audrey, he coauthored Falling Through the Ceiling: Our ADHD Family Memoir, a book about the challenges of raising their three ADHD sons in the 1980s and 90s. After publishing the book, Dr. Jones trained as an ADHD and life coach. He assists and guides individuals and families about education and career choices when there are barriers to success based on ADHD or other causes. As the founder of TASTE of Success Coaching, “turning ADHD from stigma to stability” is his mission.

2022 Young Scientist Research Award

Courtney Zulauf-McCurdy, PhD

Courtney Zulauf-McCurdy, PhD, is an acting assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington. She earned her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020, where she found that the reason Black boys are being disproportionately expelled from preschool is at least in part related to teachers’ biased perceptions of parents. She completed her predoctoral internship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she focused on integrating evidence-based treatments for ADHD into community settings. She recently finished an Institute of Education Sciences postdoctoral fellowship focused on implementation science at the University of Washington SMART Center.

Dr. Zulauf-McCurdy’s work is driven by a commitment to improve outcomes for young children with ADHD from historically minoritized backgrounds. She is focused on adapting interventions to improve engagement in underserved communities. To date, the majority of ADHD interventions have been designed without the input of historically minoritized families, resulting in interventions that do not adequately address barriers that these parents face. Her work uses research methods, such as community advisory boards and qualitative methods, that seek to elevate the voices of parents, educators, and practitioners to understand the needs of historically disadvantaged families and to use this information to (re)design interventions to promote engagement. Through continued collaboration with community partners, dissemination of her findings to stakeholders and policy makers, and connecting her research to inform culturally responsive practice and policies, she hopes to dismantle disparities in preschool ADHD outcomes.

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Catrina Calub, PhD

Catrina Calub, PhD, is a recent graduate from the clinical psychology program at the University of Central Florida. She completed her predoctoral internship at the Oregon Health Science University Institute on Development & Disability and will begin her postdoctoral research at the UC Davis MIND Institute. She received her undergraduate degree in psychobiology at UCLA and her master’s degree in psychology at California State University Sacramento. Her research interests have primarily focused on understanding the behavioral and neurocognitive mechanisms underlying ADHD. Under the mentorship of Mark Rapport, PhD, her research project for this award examines whether children with ADHD and typically developing children differ in their attention control abilities based on a novel attention control task and prefrontal hemodynamic functioning (oxyHb) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a movement-tolerant neuroimaging tool. These findings may help us understand why a wide range of poor functional outcomes persist for individuals with ADHD despite receipt of gold-standard treatments and offers insight into a potential target for intervention.

She will be a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis under the mentorship of Julie Schweitzer, PhD, to expand her knowledge of the neurobiological and cognitive underpinnings of ADHD and engage in interdisciplinary epidemiological research to investigate environmental factors of ADHD outcomes. Her long-term goal is not only to use empirical evidence to improve existing therapies and develop novel interventions for individuals with neurodevelopmental differences, but to also address the inequities that exist in our current healthcare system.

2022 Educator of the Year Award

Ken P. Utz, Jr.

Graduating cum laude with a bachelor of arts in music, Ken Utz attended the University of North Texas. While there, he was a member of the concert band and many jazz bands, including the 5:00 Lab Band and the Catholic campus music ministry. An Eagle Scout, he is a Vigil Honor member of the Order of the Arrow and has served as the staff director and camp director of Circle Ten Council’s Winter Camp at Camp Trevor Rees Jones.

Utz has worked at The Shelton School in Dallas, Texas, since 2003 with the upper elementary, middle school, and upper school band students. In 2014, he began working with lower school and upper elementary general music students. He received the Shelton Parents Association Recognition Kudos (SPARK) Award for the 2020-2021 school year. As vice president of the Music Learning Band Program, Utz works closely with Jerry Bishop and their team providing instrumental, vocal, and general music programs to more than forty different schools across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and Eastern Arizona. He and his wife Haley have three children: Kenny, Natalie, and Meghan. His son Kenny is a sixth-grade Shelton student and member of the after-school band and drumline. Utz is an active member of Christ the King Catholic Church, where he serves as a lector and usher.

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Kathryn Essig, MEd

The founder and president of Essig Education Group, Kathryn Essig has spent thirty years working in special education. Before starting her current practice, she worked in public and private schools as a special educator, educational diagnostician, and learning specialist. She has worked in private practice as an executive function coach, as a curriculum consultant to private schools in the Metro DC area, and as the owner and founder of a learning center. Essig has spent her career observing students with variable executive function skills, training them to externalize necessary study strategies, and adapting school curricula to ensure their success.

She has developed a model for student success that allows learners to understand their best organization and study strategies, then implement and individualize the skills to create learned independence. While creating the Learning Center at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia, she developed a unique study skills curriculum (Essential Study Skills) which, combined with her empowering coaching, has helped numerous students meet their academic potential. Her practice still offers this course during summer vacations.

Over the last several years, Essig has become increasingly interested in school transitions, college attrition, “failure to launch,” and the students she refers to as “rebounders.” Her most recent dive into research has been to look at bright students who were over-assisted in high school and are unable to find autonomy in college.

With ever-increasing numbers of bright students experiencing academic struggles, Essig’s practice focuses on the intersection of executive function, resilience, and learned independence for students in elementary school through college and adults as she helps her clients rewrite smart.

2022 CHADD Volunteer Leader of the Year

Suzanne Sophos

Suzanne Sophos is a social-emotional learning specialist, parent educator, writer, and family coach who has been engaged in family and child work since 2010. She manages the ADHD Empowerment Community and serves as the chapter coordinator and executive director of CHADD of San Fernando Valley—Los Angeles.

An active member of CHADD at both the local and national level for the past six years, she joined her local chapter when her son was diagnosed with ADHD. For several years she served as the chapter’s marketing volunteer, helping to promote its events and doing community outreach. In 2017, she was diagnosed with ADHD and was asked to serve as the chapter’s coordinator. Driven by the mission of connecting the local ADHD community—from parents and adults to educators and treatment professionals—she created the chapter’s first board of directors. She has been instrumental in growing her chapter, ushering it from about twenty to well over 1,500 members. She currently oversees and co-facilitates thirteen monthly meetings, including peer support groups for parents of children with ADHD, adults with ADHD, and young women with ADHD. She serves as a moderator for the community’s Discord server and Facebook groups, curates its Understanding ADHD speaker series, and mentors ADHD educators and support group facilitators. She has also developed and nurtured strong relationships with local schools, educators, and ADHD professionals.

At the national level, Sophos serves on CHADD’s chapter advisory committee, helping to unite and support CHADD chapters across the country. Her work is informed by her education, professional experience, and life experience. She is passionate about helping struggling children to thrive, worried parents to find peace, and families to find a stronger sense of connection. She is grateful to the CHADD community for empowering and supporting her own ADHD family and honored to be able to give her time to such a life-changing organization.

Early Career Influencer Award

Connor DeWolfe

Connor DeWolfe is a mental health advocate known for his humorous and educational TikToks, amassing over five million followers. He has performed in various theatrical productions on the local and collegiate level.

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Sasha Hamdani, MD

Sasha Hamdani, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist and ADHD clinical specialist. In high school, she founded WorldHarmonyOnline, a nonprofit organization serving to create a nonviolent and equitable world with access to technology, healthcare, and education for all. She was then accepted into the six-year accelerated BA/MD program at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, did her psychiatry residency training at the University of Arizona Phoenix Psychiatry program, and completed her final year of training at Kansas University. She currently has a thriving private practice in Kansas City, where she sees patients ages six years and up.

Dr. Hamdani also has a robust social media following on Instagram and TikTok (@thepsychdoctormd), where she breaks down stigmas and provides accessible information about ADHD from the unique perspective of someone who has been both a patient and a provider. Most recently, she was selected to participate in the Healthcare Leaders in Social Media roundtable at the White House and continues to work on efforts regarding the healthcare burnout crisis with the US Vice President and the US Surgeon General.

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Stacey Machelle

Stacey Machelle is the creator, writer, and host of the YouTube Channel, ADHD is the New BLACK, the YouTube channel created to raise awareness about ADHD in Black women and women of color. The videos provide a safe, non-judgmental community to access vetted information, productivity tools, and strategies to help women manage ADHD symptoms. Her circuitous path to solopreneurership began during her first career as an on-air news anchor and journalist, on-air talent and writer for TMZ, and many other unrelated jobs in between and along the way. Although Stacey currently works as an audience warmup comic on various talk shows in Los Angeles, she is well on her way to becoming a certified ADHD Life Coach through ADDCA. She sends special thanks to ADDA for educational sponsorship and to ADDCA for coordinating with ADDA to make her education possible.