The UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) is pleased to welcome two interns for its fifth cohort of the Implementation Summer Internship Program. This paid internship program is designed to create a challenging and meaningful professional experience for masters and doctoral students, providing exposure to implementation practice and research across a variety of fields and practice settings.

FPG’s Implementation work consists of three workgroups—The Impact Center, the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN), and the Trohanis Technical Assistance Projects. Using implementation science, best practices, and an equity lens, FPG's implementation work is active, applied, and facilitates improved outcomes for evidence-based practices. Our implementation workgroups' capacity-building work is tailored and flexible to meet the needs of the communities we work in whether the work is statewide, within a governance structure, community-wide, or within a service delivery agency or school.

Meet the new interns:

Alden Parker is pursuing a Master of Social Work at NYU's Silver School of Social Work and a Master of Arts in Child Development at Sarah Lawrence College. She holds a B.S. in Psychology from Clemson University and completed a Leadership and Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities Fellowship at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC).

Parker has three years of experience as a special education teacher, as well as experience in MUSC’s developmental behavioral pediatrics assessment and evaluation. She is passionate about child development intervention efforts and holds a Social-Emotional and Character Development Education certification from Rutgers University.

In her professional and personal life, Parker cares deeply about the lived experiences of people with disabilities, as well as accessible, culturally informed, and quality community programming to help children and families grow.

Tori Wierzchowski earned her MPH in health behavior from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health this spring. She earned her B.A. in community health and B.S. in environmental studies from the University of Oklahoma.

Wierzchowski's interests in public health include health equity, food access, and harm reduction.

Both Parker and Wierzchowski will be working with the Impact Center at FPG with mentors Alana Gilbert, MPH, and Rebecca Roppolo, MPH, on facilitators and barriers to capacity development through The Impact Center's Implementation Capacity for Triple P (ICTP) project.