Sara Ochoa

Sara joined UW Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences in March 2020 as an instructional designer for the AIMS Center, supporting education and training projects and programs such as BHSS Clinical Training Program, the Psychiatry Residency Training Program, CHAMP, and ICTP. Before UW, she taught and developed curriculum as faculty in higher education and trained educational professionals; much of her work focused on equity, access, and representation for ESL students and adult learners. She also worked as an EFL instructor in Hiroshima, Japan, prior to moving to Seattle.

Sara received a Bachelor of Science degree in Communication Sciences & Disorders from the University of Texas at Austin and completed her Master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) at Seattle University.

Trudy Julia Mossop, M.S.

Trudy became the Continuing Education Coordinator for the AIMS Center and ICTP after spending a few years building and administering exams for the University of Washington School of Medicine MD students. For the previous decade, Trudy conducted school and community-based ongoing education for early learning educators, including running a training on-ramp program for immigrants and refugees seeking careers in early learning in King County. Trudy is passionate about mental health care being embedded into physical health care structures, enhancing a whole-person wellness perspective, in order to increase community wellness standards. Please reach out to Trudy with any questions about continuing education credits or interest in learning more about our various health care training programs.

Trudy received her master’s degree in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of Delaware and her bachelor’s degree in Human Development from Cornell University.

Esther Solano

Esther joined the AIMS center in September 2021 as a program coordinator for the Integrated Care Training Program (ICTP). Prior to the AIMS Center, Esther worked on a qualitative research study as the Research Coordinator working to address critical gaps in our current healthcare data collection systems that prohibit the identification of successful and largescale prevention and intervention targets to address injury disparities. She was also a program Coordinator for a health and racial equity initiative at Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center. She graduated from the University of Washington with her bachelor’s in public health/global health in 2020.

Melissa Farnum, MA

Melissa Farnum, MA is a Continuing Education Specialist for the AIMS Center and supports work in ICTP. She got her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Northern Colorado and went on to get her Master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from New York University. After finishing her Master’s, she taught in public schools in New York for a year before moving to Colombia and teaching English at the Universidad de Los Andes. She moved to Seattle seeking a job in the field of education broadly and found this position at the AIMS Center.

She works to support the development of training plans for implementation by working with experts to identify the best way to train providers in collaborative care. She believes her most important work has been anything that has helped promote individuals’ self-interest in learning. She hopes to help instill in others a continued love of learning. Five years from now, she hopes that collaborative care is in far-reaching settings and is able to apply to broader populations.

Betsy Payn, MA, PMP

Betsy Payn, MA, PMP is the Integrated Care Training Program’s (ICTP) project manager. She also oversees the data collection and analysis for ICTP and APA SAN Projects. Her bachelor’s and master’s degrees are in Criminal Justice from Washington State University.

Prior to coming to the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington, she worked as a senior project manager and her duties included project management, management of staff, overseeing data collection tasks and staff, proposal writing and budgeting, and data analysis. Her interest in mental health comes from her interest in crime and its connection with drug use. She is also interested in the criminalization of certain substances as opposed to others.

She’s attracted to collaborative care because it is cost-effective, and at the same time, effective at delivering mental health care. She cites her most important work as being on any project where something is learned that has been able to help people immediately. Five years from now, she hopes to see integrated care broadly implemented across the US.

Alan Gojdics, MEd

Alan Gojdics, MEd is the Assistant Director of Workforce Development for the Integrated Care Training Program (ICTP) at the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He attended school at Ohio State and got his undergraduate degree in communications. He has worked primarily in the technology field.

Thirteen years ago, he took a job at the University of Washington focusing on scaling learning using technology. This spiked an interest in education, prompting him to get his graduate degree from the UW in education. He has always had some interest in mental health, and enjoys participating in health sciences and seeing the impact of mental health treatment.

He is currently working mainly on ICTP, as well as developing scale and effectiveness behavioral intervention training and looking at technology and improving the way providers are trained. He is attracted to collaborative care’s structured approach with the goal to get better outcomes for as many patients as possible. He believes his most important work has been to reexamine and improve core training for providers and its effectiveness and accessibility. Five years from now, he sees collaborative care as a mainstream presence in the primary care setting.

Cara Towle, RN, MSN

Cara Towle, RN, MSN earned her undergraduate degree at Scripps College, and then obtained a master’s degree in International Educational Administration at the School for International Training, followed by a master’s degree in Nursing from University of California, San Francisco. After finishing graduate school, she established the International Medical Services office at UCSF, and then moved to Seattle to serve as the Director for Telehealth Services at the University of Washington (UW)for the past 15 years.

She made the move to the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences this past January to contribute to an accomplished team with a commitment to using technology and integrated care training to improve access and quality, and decrease disparities for mental health care services. Ms. Towle also helps oversee the UW Psychiatric Consultation and Telepsychiatry Program as the program’s associate director. She hopes that five years from now, this work will have made an impact on the mental health of our region, and create a model that can be replicated beyond the Pacific Northwest.