Sarah Lopano began her position as the Clinical Director and Chief Operating Officer at Cognition Builders in January 2017 and has been with the company since December 2015. Her educational background includes earning a Bachelor of Science from Georgia Southwestern State University in 2013 and a Master of Education in Child Studies from Vanderbilt University in 2015.
Lopano majored in early childhood education and minored in psychology during her undergraduate degree program. While at Vanderbilt, she specialized in Applied Behavioral Analysis. Lopano has been a Board Certified Behavioral Analyst since 2016. She held a Georgia Educator Certificate in early childhood education from 2013 to 2018.
Current and Previous Roles With Cognition Builders
Lopano is responsible for managing the daily operations of Cognition Builders in her role as Clinical Director and COO. She develops and implements Family Architect development on behavioral skills to increase the effectiveness of at-home interventions. For 13 months before starting her current position, Lopano was the Assistant Clinical Director and a Family Architect. In this role, she collaborated with her team to develop and implement behavioral strategies and acquisition of new skills for clients between the ages of 4 and 35. She provided direct service to adolescent clients to provide them with opportunities for cognitive and behavioral growth. Lopano supervised others who performed these duties as well.
Internships and Research Fellowships
Lopano completed internships and research fellowships with the Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorders, the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Behavioral Analysis Clinic, and the Peabody College Department of Special Education while completing her degree programs. These organizations are all in Nashville, and she was responsible for case management; research assistance; and, in some cases, author duties. Each experience lasted between three and nine months and provided Lopano with the practical applications that she needed to succeed in her current position.
Publications
In 2018, Lopano and three others in the field of behavioral intervention contributed 20 pages on the topic of “Using structural analysis to inform peer support arrangements for high school students with severe disabilities” in the American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. She worked with three other contributors in 2017 to produce four pages on the topic of “Teacher implemented latency-based FA and intervention in classroom settings” for Behavioral Analysis in Practice.
Sarah Lopano recently worked with four other practitioners to prepare contributions for the publications American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.
