Dr. Olga Acosta Price

Olga Acosta Price is an Associate Professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University. She is also Director of the Center for Health and Health Care in Schools, a national resource and technical assistance center committed to building effective school health programs.

A passionate advocate of school-based mental health services, Olga Acosta Price has dedicated her formal training in clinical psychology to improving the lives of young people. "My experiences working with children, youth and families have driven my desire to understand resilience and to approach our work together from a strength-based perspective," she says. Giving voice to the concerns of young people is an essential priority for her. "I thoroughly enjoy creating opportunities for youth to share their insights. They don't hesitate to tell those of us who develop systems of care that we are clueless about what the world is really like for them."

Prior to joining the faculty in 2006, Professor Price was director of the School Mental Health Program at the Department of Mental Health in Washington, DC, where she earned the Employee of the Year award. She was also an assistant professor at the University of Maryland's School of Medicine and served as associate director of the Center for School Mental Health Assistance, a national technical assistance center. In that latter capacity, she helped to promote the development of school-based mental health services across the country.

Dr. Michael Long is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health. Dr. Long is also Affiliated Faculty at the Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness and an Associate at the Center for Health and Healthcare in Schools.

Dr. Long conducts research at the intersection of epidemiology and quantitative policy analysis with the goal of identifying cost-effective and politically feasible policy solutions to promote community health. His work over the past decade has focused on identifying policy approaches to reversing the obesity epidemic in the United States. Dr. Long is also a Collaborating Mentor at the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders (STRIPED) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Prior to joining the faculty at GW in 2015, Dr. Long was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health focused on obesity epidemiology and cost-effectiveness analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health Prevention Research Center. He earned his Doctor of Science degree in 2013 from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Social and Behavioral Sciences and a Master of Public Health degree from the Yale School of Public Health, where he worked at the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics from Princeton University.

Marisa A. Parrella, LICSW, LCSW-C

Marisa Parrella joined Mary's Center in February 2014 and specializes in Children's Psychotherapy, Clinical Supervision and Program Management. Ms. Parrella is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker in (D.C.) and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (Maryland). She holds a Master's degree in Social Work from the University of Michigan and completed a Post Graduate Fellowship in Clinical Social Work at the Yale University Child Study Center. She was born in Boston to immigrant parents from Italy and speaks English and Spanish. Ms. Parrella enjoys running, hiking, cooking, reading and travel and believes that deep breathing helps to maintain good mental health.

Dr. Chioma Oruh

Chioma Oruh, Ph.D. is a management and policy analyst, consultant and disabilities rights advocate residing in Washington, DC. As a consultant, Dr. Oruh is grant writer and policy analyst with experience in offering supportive data for drafting government legislation as well as corporate and nonprofit companies. She is also a voting member of the Early Childhood Education Policy Council, which is a DC Public Schools body that reviews and advises on the city’s Head Start grant application to the Department of Health and Human Services. In addition, Dr. Oruh also serves as Consumer Advisory Member of the Georgetown University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities and as an Ex-officio Member of Family Support Council of the District’s Department of Disabilities Services. As part of her service in the District government, Dr. Oruh has had the opportunity to write grants and work on policies that impact on both public-private partnerships and Federal block grants. As a scholar, Dr. Oruh has served as a lecturer at Howard University, working with students to craft their research designs for a variety of courses in the Department of Political Science. Dr. Oruh lives in the historic neighborhood of Takoma in Ward 4 of Washington, DC with her two sons, Atty and Jedi, and is an active member of the Takoma Education Campus Parent Teacher Organization.