About Us

Dr. Melissa Faith established the PEDS Lab in 2013. She has worked with several close collaborators over time and currently closely collaborates with Dr. Allie Schuck and Dr. Ally Schimmel-Bristow in the Tampa Bay area. Drs. Schuck and Schimmel-Bristow also serve as supplemental mentors and investigators for lab trainees, expanding professional mentorship opportunities and opportunities for future recommendation letters. Our lab typically consists of a variety of attending psychologists, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students. We are based in a pediatric academic medical center in the southern United States. We transitioned to a new health system in October 2026, allowing several exciting new collaboration opportunities. 

 

Most of our research is in the domain of pediatric cancer, blood disorders, and bone marrow transplant. However, we also work with other pediatric illness groups, medical providers, and community organizations. Much of our work focuses specifically on ensuring marginalized communities have access to gold-standard mental and medical healthcare, as well as ensuring that all children and families are able to build trusting, productive relationships with all of the child's healthcare team members. Many of our studies use a mixed methods design, meaning that we collect and evaluate both quantitative and qualitative data. We also do community-engaged research, which allows us to learn from stakeholders who are directly impacted by the challenges we seek to mitigate. The lab includes a variety of research foci, including:

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• Parenting in pediatric cancer, blood disorders, bone marrow transplant, and other chronic illnesses. Our lab focuses on several parenting domains, including emotion socialization. Emotion socialization describes the various ways in which caregivers teach children to understand, label, regulate, and cope with emotions. We are also interested in constructs like overprotective parenting, caregivers' perceptions of child vulnerability, and differential parenting philosophies and behaviors for ill versus healthy children in the home. Further, we are interested in how caregivers' own emotion regulation, coping, and adjustment impact their parenting beliefs and behaviors. Finally, we are interested in cultural differences in parents' emotion socialization and other parenting practices, including ways in which culture can moderate links between parenting practices and child adjustment. We conduct most of our parenting work in pediatric hematology, oncology, and bone marrow transplant. However, we have also investigated these constructs in other illness populations, including pediatric obesity, neonatal intensive care, and families affected by Covid-19.

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• Peer and sibling adjustment in pediatric cancer, blood disorders, and other chronic illnesses. Dr. Faith's early work was in selective interventions (e.g., school-based mentoring) for chronically bullied youth. These days, the PEDS Lab investigates parameters that are associated with and stand to improve youths' peer and sibling relationships during pediatric chronic illness. As part of this interest area, we are interested in sibling coping when one child in the family has cancer, a blood disorder, or another chronic illness. Finally, we are interested in selective peer victimization interventions that can be applied to and tailored for youth with chronic illnesses. 

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• Health and healthcare equity. One of our lab's primary foci is health equity. For example, we are interested in exploring how legislation could differentially impact chronically ill youth who identify as a racial or ethnic minority (e.g., policies impacting pain medication access for youth with sickle cell disease). We are also interested in pediatric healthcare providers' beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge about sexual and gender minority youth healthcare. We are interested in evaluating ways in which culture and language could moderate efficacy of evidence-based interventions. Finally, we are interested in reducing health disparities by decreasing stigma, enhancing health literacy, and mitigating barriers for research participation (e.g., federally-funded genetics studies) for all families.

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• Implementing, evaluating, and disseminating evidence-based interventions. Our lab is especially interested in promoting evidence-based psychotherapeutic and behavioral health interventions in large medical and community settings. For example, can we implement motivational interviewing training on a large scale to promote even better patient care in large medical centers? Can we train providers in community organizations to identify appropriate referrals for evidence-based psychological intervention? Further, what are the best ways to promote inclusive language among healthcare providers to promote full health-behavior disclosure among youth who identify as sexual or gender minorities? For chronically ill youth, our lab has adapted and evaluated several interventions that were previously validated for healthy children. For example, we evaluated a brief, culturally-adapted motivational interviewing intervention to promote oral chemotherapy adherence during pediatric cancer. We also evaluated the same culturally-adapted intervention to promote maternal presence in the neonatal intensive care unit. Finally, we are currently evaluating a well-established parent management intervention specifically in a pediatric cancer sample. In addition to testing interventions that were previously validated with healthy samples, our lab also creates and tests adherence-focused and health behavior-focused interventions based on evidence-based change mechanisms that have not yet been adapted for and applied to chronically ill youth. For example, we are currently evaluating a newly developed intervention to improve nutrition and physical activity among adolescent and young adult survivors of childhood cancer. We are also evaluating a novel prophylaxis adherence intervention for youth with sickle cell disease.