Kristie Brandt, M.S., Ph.D.

Dr. Kristie Brandt is Director of the Parent-Infant & Child Institute in Napa, CA. She is an Infant-Parent Mental Health Specialist and, with Dr. Ed Tronick, Chief of the Child Development Unit of Boston Children’s Hospital, she co-developed and co-directs the Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship, a 15-month training program for professionals. Brandt is a board certified nurse-midwife and nurse-practitioner, holding both a Master of Science in nursing and a Doctorate from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and has maintained a private women’s health care practice in Napa since 1982.

She was Napa County’s Chief Public Health Manager and retired in January 2007 after nearly 25 years overseeing maternal-child health and general public health services in California’s Napa Valley. While in this position, she developed and oversaw Napa’s Therapeutic Child Care Center, the first such center in the country serving high-risk children 0-5 in a full-day, full-year therapeutic program. Since 1994, Brandt has worked with Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and is one of three speakers who accompany Brazelton on the National Seminar Series, an educational program for professionals and parents. She is the site coordinator for Napa Valley’s Touchpoints Project that has trained over 600 providers since 1996. She is a trainer and mentor for Boston’s Brazelton Touchpoints Center, and has conducted or participated in national and international Touchpoints trainings. She has assisted in development of Touchpoints materials, and is on the Brazelton Touchpoints Project’s Board of Directors.

Dr. Brandt has developed and co-developed assessment tools, and authored and co-authored chapters and publications for peer-review journals, invited articles, and public domain publication under state grants. She is a reviewer for Pediatrics, the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and has consulted for the Proctor & Gamble Pampers Parent Institute reviewing parenting and childbirth education publications.

Since 1992, she has been a certified trainer in the Parent-Child Interaction Scales for NCAST at the University of Washington, and has trained hundreds of providers in this method for observing and assessing parent-infant cueing and interaction. She is trained in both the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale and the Newborn Behavior Observation system, and recently completed a chapter on each for two books in press. Dr. Brandt has a special interest in adult learning models. In addition, her expertise and research interests include: fostering optimal early relationships as a primary public health intervention to support lifelong health and well-being, infant-parent mental health, therapeutic interventions to support attachment and regulatory capacities, nurse home visiting, the impact of Touchpoints-based care on health and parenting, postpartum mood disorders, factors influencing breastfeeding success, premenstrual bio-behavioral variability, and familial breast and ovarian cancer.

Dr. Brandt participated in Zero-to-Three’s Infant-Mental Health Task Force and is on the California committee exploring multi-disciplinary Infant-Mental Health specialist endorsement. She was an inaugural First 5 Napa Commissioner serving from 1998-2006, and has served on many community boards and committees. She is a member of the American College of Nurse-Midwives and Sigma Theta Tau International Nursing Honor Society.