The Team

Louise M. Tiranoff, PhD

President and Executive Producer

Louise M. Tiranoff, PhD, sole member and founder of Tiranoff Productions LLC/GeneticaLens (GL) is a documentary filmmaker with more than 25 years experience. Louise served as producer, cinematographer and principal investigator for the Angelman Project (Phase I and II) a video database on Angelman syndrome, and Autism Spectrum Disorders Risk Alert (Phase I and II) both projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke). Under her direction, GL developed The SEE system (Symptoms-Surveillance Education and Enhancements), including the website Well Child Lens, that will enable pediatric practitioners and parents to quickly identify the risk alerts of autism.

Louise’s television credits include documentary segments and series, which she photographed and directed including 30 episodes of A Woman Is… a documentary series for NBC/WRC-TV, Washington, D.C. Her film Artists of the Dance won a Cine Golden Eagle and aired on the Arts and Entertainment network (A&E). She was Director of Photography of a two-part documentary special, Investigative Reports: Execution at Midnight produced for A&E. She was nominated for an Emmy for City Kid/Country Kid produced for WCBS-TV in New York. Louise is the founder/co-director of The Fearless Theater Company and has written and directed plays for The Celebration Series performed at Lincoln Center in New York featuring such artists as Benny Golson, Gregory Hines, Wynton Marsalis, Antonia Franceschi of the New York City Ballet, and Itzhak Perlman.

Christer P. Gomes

Post Supervisor/Editor

An Apple Certified Pro editor and post-production technician, Christer has produced and edited over 600 different shows and documentaries, from short to feature length, in more than 10 years of professional experience. His diverse perspective of production and editing applications is the result of experience in various types of editing projects, i.e., broadcast programming to research/educational documentaries, narratives to music videos, short films to cooking shows, classical concerts to TV commercials. He directed nearly 200 episodes of Chotoder Prithibi and Adventure of Ponu Dada (children's adventure shows), which were broadcast on the Asian Television Network to 110 countries. Christer is also a trained classical musician. Integrating his musicality with technical hands-on expertise, he incorporates a wide range of skills in editing and production techniques. His artistic skill— whether working as a video or sound editor, colorist, music composer or scriptwriter, or a freelance photographer—is not only his profession but also his passion.

Andrew Gaunt

Web programmer/developer; Database designer/engineer

Andrew Gaunt has over 15 years of professional information technology teaching experience – both hardware and software systems, design as well as hands-on development. His experience is focused on user friendly and responsive forward facing website builds. He is also an expert in integrated database and Content Management System back ends as well as graphic design and project management overall. Since 2000, Andy has worked with Tiranoff Productions LLC/GeneticaLens (GL) and has become very involved in developing specific custom applications for this company. He was the lead architect for the development of the Well Child Lens website - and that entailed converting the paper-based Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT) and creating a dynamic and interactive video-enhanced version known as the Interactive Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (iM-CHAT), - including the follow up interviews and questions.

He has also developed the GeneticaLens digital assets system which allows GL to manage and maintain all video digital assets with related information and keyword for use on the Web. The system is an end to end custom solution. Andy developed the design and managed and oversaw the coding of the entire website including the iM-CHAT and developed an online video library broken out by categories that enables visitors to easily navigate through over 500 hours of video. Members can favorite videos as well as add personal notes that all tie in to the interface known as the well line, which was developed to enable parents and caregivers to see a timeline for their children and learn about developmental milestones. The well-line pre-populates with important milestones based on the child's age. He has also developed a clinical version of the IMCHAT screening tool for use in pilots for clinics in Atlanta and Delaware. Having an in-depth knowledge and understanding of everything built to date for Well Child Lens gives Andy a unique position in terms of developing and planning new features, elements and systems for GeneticaLens going forward.

Greg Polin

Producer

Greg Polin has spent the last six years working in film and documentary production. He worked as post production coordinator on the Peabody Award winning Sundance Channel documentary mini-series Nimrod Nation, and as the associate producer in the field for the Emmy Award-nominated documentary series Circus for PBS. He also spent two years as production coordinator and assistant camera on television commercials for New York based MacGuffin Films. He directed I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, which won 2nd place for best student documentary feature at the WorldFest Film Festival in Houston in 2006, and Special Selection by the Philadelphia Documentary Film Festival in 2007. He received his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Philosophy in 2005 from Trinity College in Hartford, CT.

Michael Tiranoff

Senior Editor

Michael Tiranoff has edited over 340 medical documentaries for projects funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NYU Graduate School of Medicine, and Genzyme to create a video database of behavioral components of syndromes and diseases, including Autism Spectrum Disorders. He is the senior editor for 2 hour-long documentaries, Diagnosing MPS-1 and Diagnosing MPS-2. Both are used for Continuing Medical Education (CME) by the New York University Graduate School of Medicine. He was Assistant Director of a 16mm feature length film, Milt & Honi, which features jazz bassist Milt Hinton and jazz tap dancer Charles "Honi" Coles, and was narrated by Gregory Hines. Other documentaries edited include Tap N Blues, a feature-length documentary presented at the 2005 Dance on Camera Festival in New York City, Brooklyn in 24 Hours that was presented at the Inauguration of Brooklyn Borough President, Marty Markowitz in 2002, and The Hebrew Alphabet from Antiquity to the Computer. The film Arabbin', which he directed as well as well as edited, was a finalist at the 1978 American Film Festival in New York City, and presented at the Conference on Southern Folklore in Columbia, SC. In 2002, Arabbin' was presented at the Maryland Film Symposium, and in 2007 at the Theatre Project in Baltimore.

Patrick Bonck

Copy Editor

Patrick is an actor, copywriter, editor and thinker. Originally from Tacoma, WA, he has been living in New York for 6 years, and is honored to work with the talented, creative, and committed crew at GeneticaLens. He has worked on other long-term projects with Brooklyn Child and Family Services and Habitat for Humanity.

Diana Robins, PhD

Clinical Neuropsychologist

Diana L. Robins, Ph.D. leads the Program Area in Early Detection and Intervention for ASD at the AJ Drexel Autism Institute. Much of her work has centered on developing, validating, and refining a widely used screening tool for ASD, the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT). Together, she and Dr. Tiranoff created the Interactive Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (iM-CHAT) and have initiated pilot studies using the iM-CHAT in several pediatric practices. They are also collaborating on the development of the Well Child Lens Autism- Clinical Version for pediatricians that will fully integrate with any electronic medical record (EMR) system.

The original M-CHAT paper has been cited more than 900 times, and the validation of the recent revision, M-CHAT-R with Follow-Up (M-CHAT-R/F), demonstrated that the 2-stage screening questionnaire detects many cases of autism, and children in the study were diagnosed about two years younger than the national median, which facilitates access to ASD-specific early intervention. Dr. Robins believes that the iM-CHAT will further improve upon the text-based M-CHAT-R/F by modeling target behaviors in the video examples that accompany each screening item.

Dr. Robins’ research has been funded by many agencies, including the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Autism Speaks, and the National Institute of Mental Health. Her work has been published in leading pediatric and autism journals, including Pediatrics, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, and Autism: the International Journal of Science and Practice. She currently sits on the editorial boards or Neuropsychology and the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Dr. Robins received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology, with an emphasis in Clinical Neuropsychology from the University of Connecticut. Following her APA-approved internship at the University of Florida Health Sciences Center, Dr. Robins completed a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale University School of Medicine Child Study Center. She then spent 10 years on the faculty at Georgia State University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology and the Neuroscience Institute. Dr. Robins joined the AJ Drexel Autism Institute Faculty in July 2014.

Connor Kerns, PhD

Clinical Psychologist

Dr. Kerns received her masters and doctoral degrees in clinical psychology from Temple University and completed her predoctoral internship in pediatric psychology at A. I. DuPont Hospital for Children. Dr. Kerns has been working with Drs. Robins and Tiranoff on the iM-CHAT pilot programs at pediatric practices as well as participating in the development of the Well Child Lens- Clinical Version. Dr. Kerns received extensive training in the assessment and cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT) of child anxiety and related childhood disorders at the Child and Adolescent Anxiety Disorders Clinic of Temple University and the Child and OCD, Tics, Trich and Anxiety Group of University of Pennsylvania. She has also had the privilege to train and collaborate with both the Seaver Autism Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai and the Center for Autism (CAR) Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).

Dr. Kerns has conducted and published studies on broad array of topics including the role of paternal age in ASD risk, the co-occurrence of childhood psychopathologies, and differential predictors of CBT efficacy for child anxiety. Her present research focuses on the overlap, assessment and treatment of anxiety and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Her ongoing projects aim to explore the varied presentation and phenomenology of anxiety in ASD and the implications of this variation for effective anxiety measurement and treatment. Dr. Kerns is also preparing to extend this work to the understudied area of traumatic events and their sequelae in youth with ASD. Another area of interest is the use of technology to facilitate the dissemination of empirically based treatments. Dr. Kerns is currently working to develop cost-effective, computer-assisted CBTs for youth with ASD and anxiety, interactive social stories to improve skill generalization in ASD, and video-enhanced ASD screening and educational tools. Her long terms goals include developing a parsimonious model of psychiatric co-occurrence to inform the design and dissemination of cross-diagnostic assessments and treatments that will improve child wellbeing and development.

Julia Cass, MS

Journalist

Julia Cass is an award winning journalist with more than 35 years experience reporting and writing for newspapers, magazines and non-profit organizations. She is the author of a book, Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J.L. Chestnut Jr., published by Farrar Straus and Giroux, and she was a member of the Philadelphia Inquirer team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster. Recently, she wrote the scripts for some of Well Child Lens’ learning courses and CMEs as well as content for the website and was a key member of the GeneticaLens research/writing team for a recent NIH grant submission. As a free-lance writer, she is presently doing profiles and reports on child poverty and youth incarceration for the Children's Defense Fund. Ms. Cass received her Masters degree in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.

Barbara Weber-Floyd, MS

Journalist

Ms. Weber-Floyd has over 25 years experience as a print and broadcast journalist. Since 2010, she has collaborated with Dr. Tiranoff on projects that range from the company business plan and NIH grant applications to writing content for the website. A graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. Weber-Floyd’s journalism career has included: magazine reporting; field producing at CBS News in New York; segment producing for the national PBS business program, Adam Smith’s Money World; outreach and website writing for the PBS documentary, The Mystery of Love. She has worked with many authors, such as Dr. Robin Stern (Project Rebirth) and Michael Takiff (A Complicated Man), as well as several novelists, as a researcher/editor. In addition, as an experienced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) writer, she has helped companies increase their online presence through the addition of SEO quality content on their websites.