| 2012 Conference - Presenters |
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Amy Claessens, an assistant professor in the Harris School, studies education, child development, and public policy. Her work investigates how policies and programs influence child development and how early achievement and socioemotional skills relate to subsequent life outcomes. Claessens's work uses administrative or large-scale longitudinal data and utilizes both quantitative and qualitative techniques. Claessens has investigated a wide-range of issues surrounding child development and public policy including an experimental work support program and how achievement and socioemotional skills at school entry relate to later school achievement. This research on school readiness was featured in the New York Times. Much of Claessens's research examines how out-of-home contexts such as child care, preschool, and school influence child well being. Her dissertation, "The Development and Determinants of Academic and Socioemotional Skills in Middle Childhood," examined how achievement and socioemotional skills develop and interrelate over the course of elementary school and how school-age child care experiences influenced this development. Claessens received a Child Care Bureau Dissertation Research Scholar Grant to fund a portion of her dissertation. She also has examined school reform and school choice policies in the Chicago Public Schools. She has recently begun investigating early childhood policy in Australia in conjunction with the Australian Government, focusing on universal preschool and early child care experiences. Claessens holds a PhD in human development and social policy from Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy. Prior to joining the faculty at the Harris School, Claessens was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
Dr. Joshua Coleman is a psychologist in private practice in the SF Bay Area and is Co-Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. He has been a frequent guest on the Today Show, NPR, and The BBC,and has also been featured on Sesame Street, 20/20, Good Morning America, America Online Coaches, PBS Life Part 2, and numerous news programs for FOX, ABC, CNN, and NBC television. His advice has appeared in The New York Times, The Times of London, Fortune, Newsweek, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Psychology Today, U.S. World and News Report, Parenting Magazine and many others. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters and has written four books: The Marriage Makeover: Finding Happiness in Imperfect Harmony (St. Martin's Press); The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework (St. Martin's Press); When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don't Get Along (HarperCollins); and Married with Twins: Life, Love and the Pursuit of Marital Harmony. His books have been translated into Chinese, Croatian, and Korean, and are also available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia.
Stephanie Coontz is Co-Chair and Director of Research and Public Education of the Council on Contemporary Families. Dr. Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She is the author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (new edition, Basic Books, 2000), The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families (Basic Books, 1997), and The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families. She also edited American Families: A Multicultural Reader (Routledge, 1999) and has contributed to numerous anthologies. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. Dr. Coontz is a receipient of the Washington Governor's Writers Award and the Dale Richmond Award of the American Academy of Pediatrics for "outstanding contributions to the field of child development." She is currently working on a history of marriage.
Claudia J. Coulton is the Lillian F. Harris Professor of Urban Social Research, Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland OH, USA. She is also the co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, where a multidisciplinary team has been working for over 20 years to develop tools to better understand macro-level systemic forces that create distressed neighborhoods and what individuals, organizations and policies can do to reverse these conditions. Coulton is a founder and board member of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership with affiliates in over 30 cities that support technically advanced information solutions to enable data-driven approaches to community change. She has been a research adviser to many community change programs including Aspen Institute's Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives, the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Making Connections initiative and the Invest in Children program. Coulton has conducted research over many years focusing on the problems of distressed urban neighborhoods and approaches to community revitalization. Her current studies focus on processes of residential mobility and neighborhood identity in communities; the effects of the foreclosure crisis on families and neighborhoods; and the influences of the built and social environment on health and development.
Professor Sacha Coupet is an Associate Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where she began teaching in 2004. She is a 2000 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1997 after completing her dissertation research on African-American grandparent caregivers. Upon graduation, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Theodore A. McKee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, and then as a law clerk to the Honorable Joseph A. Greenaway, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey (now, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Newark). She went on to become a Dean's Fellow at the University of Michigan Law School, where she taught for two years in the Child Advocacy Law Clinic. Professor Coupet's teaching and research interests focus on policy and practice issues in child and family welfare and juvenile justice. Her approach aims to incorporate empirical inquiry into legal discourse with a particular emphasis on the use of social science research in the development of law and policy.
Kelly Crane is a Policy Specialist with the Child Welfare Project. She is involved in conducting legislative research and policy analysis on child welfare issues. Kelly also tracks and summaries child welfare legislation and practices and responds to state legislators on their requests for information on state child maltreatment issues. Before joining NCSL, Kelly worked for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services in the Clinical Division. She was intimately involved with a new Departmentinitiative in the development and implementation of a statewide front-end comprehensive assessment program through a number of capacities. Kelly began her career at the Illinois Attorney General's Office serving as the program and research manager for the Sex Offender Management Board. She spent her time there conducting statewide research on adult sex offender management practices in probation, parole and treatment facilities as well as assisting in the development and passing of legislation on the treatment and management of adult sex offenders in Illinois. Kelly received a B.S in 1999 from Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana and a MSW in 2001 from Jane Addams College of Social Work in Chicago, Illinois.  Return to Conference Program
Dr. Dallas received her doctoral degree in nursing sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She received postdoctoral training as a Family Research Consortium III postdoctoral fellow at Penn State University. As an Associate Professor in the UIC College of Nursing she has received NIH funding to examine father involvement in low-income African American families from the multiple perspectives of persons who shape his fatherhood role. She has published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and has presented both nationally and internationally. She is currently working on a proposal to NIH to examine nurses' contribution to health disparities in the health care delivered to pregnant and parenting African American adolescents. This study builds on her previous NINR-funded Return to Conference Program
Dr. Alan Dettlaff's research interests focus on improving outcomes for children of color in the child welfare system through the elimination of racial disparities. Specifically, Dr. Dettlaff is actively involved in research addressing the overrepresentation of African American children in the child welfare system and identifying and understanding the unique needs of immigrant Latino children who come to the attention of this system. Dr. Dettlaff is also Principal Investigator of the Jane Addams Child Welfare Traineeship Project, which provides advanced training and financial assistance to students pursuing careers in child welfare. Dr. Dettlaff's practice experience includes several years as a practitioner and administrator in public child welfare, where he specialized in investigations of maltreatment.
Dr. Alan Dettlaff's research interests focus on improving outcomes for children of color in the child welfare system through the elimination of racial disparities. Specifically, Dr. Dettlaff is actively involved in research addressing the overrepresentation of African American children in the child welfare system and identifying and understanding the unique needs of immigrant Latino children who come to the attention of this system. Dr. Dettlaff is also Principal Investigator of the Jane Addams Child Welfare Traineeship Project, which provides advanced training and financial assistance to students pursuing careers in child welfare. Dr. Dettlaff's practice experience includes several years as a practitioner and administrator in public child welfare, where he specialized in investigations of maltreatment. Return to Conference Program
John Fluke has more than 32 years of experience in social service delivery system research in the area of Child Welfare and Mental Health Services for children. In November 2007 he became the director of the Child Protection Research Center at the American Humane Association. As of January 2012 he became the vice president of the Children's Innovation Institute and is a Scholar in Residence at the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver. He is internationally recognized as a researcher specializing in assessing and analyzing decision making in human services delivery systems. He is also known for his innovative and informative evaluation work in the areas of child welfare administrative data analysis, workload and costing, and performance and outcome measurement for children and family services. As a research manager he has experience in directing research and evaluation projects focused on maltreatment surveillance data, children's mental health, child protective service risk and safety assessment, expedited permanency, guardianship, family group decision making, trauma services, adoption, and screening. He is also active in the area of national child maltreatment data collection systems and analysis and has worked with data collection programs in Canada, Saudi Arabia, the US, and for UNICEF. He has been active in research and evaluation at all levels of government, in the private not-for-profit sector, and with national foundations and associations that includes work both in the U.S. and internationally. The author or co-author of numerous scholarly publications, Dr. Fluke has presented papers at both national and international meetings and conferences. He is co-chair of the Working Group on Child Maltreatment Data Collection for ISPCAN. He holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Decision Science from Union Institute and Universities, an MA in Anthropology from the Pennsylvania State University, and a BA in Mathematical Anthropology from the University of Northern Colorado.
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Dr. Tamara Fuller received her bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Iowa in 1989. She then came to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned both a M.A and Ph.D. in clinical/community psychology. After a clinical internship at the Georgetown University Center for Child and Human Development in Washington, DC, she returned to Champaign-Urbana and worked at Carle Hospital in the neuropsychology department. Dr. Fuller joined the staff at the Children and Family Research Center at the School of Social Work in 1997 as a research specialist. She became Associate Director of the Children and Family Research Center in 2003, and was promoted to Director in 2010. Dr. Fuller is the Principal Investigator of a four year evaluation, funded by the National Quality Improvement Center on Differential Response in Child Protective Services, which will evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of Differential Response in Illinois. Dr. Fuller is also the Principal Investigator of research program of the Children and Family Research Center. Each year, the Center's research program is developed in consultation with the Department of Children and Family Services and the plaintiff's attorneys for the B.H. Consent Decree. The Center is responsible for monitoring the outcomes for children in the B.H. class, which includes those children in or at risk of foster care in Illinois. Other research projects subsumed within the Center's research agenda include annual evaluation of the impact of safety assessment on children investigated for child abuse and neglect, an examination of the impact of foster parent licensing on child safety, and family engagement in child protective services.
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Robert M. Goerge is a Chapin Hall Senior Research Fellow with more than 25 years of research focused on improving the available information on children and families, particularly those who require specialized services related to maltreatment, disability, poverty, or violence. Dr. Goerge developed Chapin Hall's Integrated Database on Child and Family Programs in Illinois, which links the administrative data on social service receipt, education, criminal and juvenile justice, employment, healthcare, and early childhood programs to provide a comprehensive picture of child and family use of publicly provided or financed service programs. His work provides high-quality information to policymakers to improve the programs serving children and their families. For example, he studies Illinois families' use of multiple service systems and how the use of these services varies by family characteristics and geographically. He has been a Member of the Panel on Data and Methods for Measuring the Effects of Changes in Social Welfare Programs of the National Academy of Sciences, and is a Technical Work Group member of the National Study of Child and Adolescent Well-Being, funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He is the Principal Investigator of the of the National Study of Early Care and Education. Dr. Goerge received his Ph.D. from the School of Social Service Administration of the University of Chicago. He is also co-founder of the International Society for Child Indicators.
Joseph Grady, PhD
Joseph Grady, Ph.D. is a principal and co-founder of the Topos Partnership and Cultural Logic, strategic communications and research firms that apply cognitive and social science principles to developing more effective communications approaches on public interest issues. Over the course of nearly fifteen years in the field, he has offered guidance on effective framing at the White House as well as in many other fora, and his work has included issue areas from the role of government in American life to the arts, child development, nuclear weapons, global warming, economic policy, labor issues, nitrogen pollution, and many others. Grady has helped develop both innovative techniques for developing and testing messages, and a range of effective communications approaches now in use by advocacy organizations across the country. Grady received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley, and also worked for several years as a consultant in the commercial branding industry.
Brian Gran is on the faculty of the Sociology Department and Law School of Case Western Reserve University. He is primary investigator of the NSF-sponsored project that is developing the Children's Rights Index. Gran is the co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Sociology and Human Rights. His recent work appears in Child Welfare, The International Journal of Children's Rights, and Problemy Wczesnej Edukacji. Gran is completing an international project on independent children's rights institutions, and starting a project on child trafficking.
Rachel Gordon, PhD
Womazetta Jones, PhD
Womazetta Jones began her social work career as a child welfare specialist with DCFS in 1991, monitoring intact family and placement cases. In 1994 she became a Child Protection Investigator, in 1999 Child Protection Investigative Serious Harms Supervisor, and in 2000 a Child Protection Investigative/Intact Manager. In 2004 she began working as the Child Protective Training Manager and also continued to manage the serious harms teams in south Cook. In 2007, Mrs. Jones left the Department and went to work for the Archdiocese of Chicago as the Director of the Safe Environment Office. As the Director of the Safe Environment Office she was responsible for the implementation of Articles 6, 12 and, 13 of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). She provided oversight for compliance with the USCCB Charter for approximately 225 Elementary Schools, 40 High Schools and 360 Parishes, Shrines and Missions within the Archdiocese of Chicago. In 2009, Mrs. Jones returned to the Department as the Project Director for Differential Response. Womazetta Jones has a B.S. from Western Illinois University and a M.A. from Chicago State University.
Jill E. Korbin earned her Ph.D. in 1978 from the University of California at Los Angeles. Korbin is a cultural and medical anthropologist. Her awards include the Margaret Mead Award (1986) from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology; a Congressional Science Fellowship (1985-86) through the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society for Research in Child Development; and the Wittke Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Case Western Reserve University. Korbin served on the National Research Council's Panel on Research on Child Abuse and Neglect, and the Institute of Medicine's Panel on Pathophysiology and Prevention of Adolescent and Adult Suicide. She is Director of the Schubert Center for Child Studies and Co-Director of the Childhood Studies Program. Korbin teaches a range of courses from introductory anthropology to upper division and graduate courses in medical and psychological anthropology and on child and family issues from an anthropological perspective. Korbin has published numerous articles on culture and child maltreatment, including her edited book, Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (1981, University of California Press), which was the first volume to examine the relationship of culture and child maltreatment. She has published and conducted research on women incarcerated for fatal child maltreatment, on cross-cultural childrearing and child maltreatment, on health, mental health and child rearing among Ohio's Amish population, and on the impact of neighborhood factors on child maltreatment and child well-being.
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Dr. GiShawn A. Mance is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Assistant Professor of Psychology at American University in Washington, DC. Dr. Mance received her Ph.D. from DePaul University of Chicago, Illinois in Clinical Psychology. She completed her APA approved internship at Duke University Medical Center, and postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. She has extensive research experience in the areas of child and adolescent development, chronic stressors (i.e., violence exposure, trauma), resiliency, mental health disparities, low-income families, emerging adults, and evidence-based practices. Dr. Mance's research and applied work addresses cultural, contextual, and psychosocial factors that influence symptom presentation, trajectories, and interventions for underserved children and adolescents. Dr. Mance has received numerous academic and community-service awards for her work. Most notably, she worked diligently with a non-profit organization, Project Butterfly, while residing in Chicago, Illinois, which provided intervention and prevention programs for African American adolescent girls. Project Butterfly received national coverage and has been featured in Essence, Blackgirl Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and MSN.com. Dr. Mance has expertise in community based participatory research (CBPR), which she garnered as a W.K. Kellogg Community Health Postdoctoral Scholar at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. As a Kellogg scholar, Dr. Mance's training emphasized CBPR, as well as, social determinants of community health, community capacity building, and cultivating equal partnerships among health-related agencies and academic centers in community-based research, service, and education. Dr. Mance worked with Dr. Darius Tandon and Dr. Freya Sonenstein on the Health and Opportunity Partnership (HOPE) project, which was a CBPR project designed to integrate health promotion strategies to reach out-of-school youth ages 18 to 24 who are also disconnected from the workforce. Currently Dr. Mance partners with several DC Public Charter Schools to engage in preventive intervention research to address adolescent depression, complex trauma, chronic stress, coping, and social/community networks. The broad objective of her project is to examine coping resources, stressful life experiences, and the role of support networks in the emergence of psychological problems among low-income urban adolescents. Lastly, Dr. Mance provides clinical services to children and adults in the Maryland/DC area. Her clinical specialty areas include: depression, anxiety, family, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), trauma, and adolescent mental health.
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Kory L. May, MSW
Mr. May has served as a guidance counselor, program coordinator, and Identification Specialist Liaison with the Federal Bureau Of Investigation within the Department of Corrections from the years of 1993-through 2002. Before leaving to pursue a career in Child Welfare with the Department Of Children and Family Services, where he serviced as a Child Welfare Specialist, Child Protection Specialist, Advance Child Protection Specialists before pursuing a career in Management where he served as Child Protection Supervisor for the Southern Region before joining the DR-Team. He Holds Bachelors in Criminal Justice (CJ) from Grambling St. University. A Master of Social Worker (MSW) Graduate Degree from Southern Illinois (Edwardsville) University.. Mr. May has currently is the Founder and President of is own for-profit/Non-forprofit Guidance Programs which address critical needs within vulnerable communities.
Dorothy Roberts, PhD
Dorothy Roberts is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law, with joint appointments in the Departments of African American Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) and as faculty fellow of the Institute for Policy Research. She has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning child welfare, reproduction, and bioethics. She is the author of the award-winning Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997) and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002) and more than 70 articles in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review, as well as co-editor of six casebooks and anthologies. Professor Roberts serves on the Braam Oversight Panel, on the board of directors of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women's Health Imperative. Her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century, was published by The New Press in July 2011.
Joel Rosch, PhD
Joel Rosch Ph.D is a senior research scholar at the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. Prior to coming to Duke, Dr. Rosch held a variety of leadership positions in North Carolina state agencies, where he worked on the development and implementation of North Carolina's North Carolina's Multiple Response System (the new differential response to child abuse and neglect system) and the Child Mental Health System. He was also worked on the redesign of a number of North Carolina's child servicing agencies including the Juvenile Justice System, the state's system of alternative education, North Carolina's Child Death Review System, and the state's model interagency treatment system for adjudicated substance abusing youth. He is regularly called upon to assist public agencies with measurement and system integration issues. For ten years he served as the co-chaired the North Carolina State Collaborative, a coalition of public and private agencies that is trying to establish a System of Care for children and families. His most recent projects at Duke include the design and evaluation of services for low performing schools in North Carolina and a program evaluating national dropout prevention efforts. His present research focuses on developing organizational structures to promote the successful adoption of evidence based programs. A political scientist, his primary research interests are on the structure of organizations that deliver services directly to the public; crime and public policy; the adoption and implementation of evidence based programs; and the framing of public dialogue about the effectiveness of public programs. He has taught courses on law and society and on crime and public policy at various colleges and universities in both the US and Japan. He has published articles and delivered papers on the implementation of evidence based programs, efforts to promote interagency collaboration, policing, crime prevention, dispute resolution, general prevention policy, courts, corrections, crime trends, the politics of crime and punishment, and Japanese law.
Virginia Rutter, PhD, has been working at the intersection of academia and media for over two decades, working in public policy, journalism, public relations, book publicity, and special issues projects for groups like CCF. She is author of two books (*The Gender of Sexuality* and *The Love Test*, both with Pepper Schwartz), numerous articles for *Psychology Today*, and scholarly articles on divorce, interracial dating, and sexuality. Virginia gives talks and workshops on representations of gender in the media, and how, why, and when academics should work with the media to gain visibility for their work and has herself been seen and heard in the *Boston Globe**, The New York Times,* *NPR* programs, the Associated Press, the *Hartford Courant*, *Daily Variety*, *USA Today*, cnn.com, and various liberal and conservative radio programs. In the past, she has been a co-investigator of the NIH-funded National Couples Survey and a public policy fellow at the National Academies of Science, and currently she is associate professor of sociology at Framingham State University, in Framingham, MA and a board member of the Council on Contemporary Families. Her Girl with Pen column, *Nice Work*, appears the last Monday of every month.
Pepper Schwartz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, and past President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. She holds a M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, as well as a M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. She has received many awards, including the Matrix Award for Achievement in Education and the International Women's Forum Award in Career Achievement in Washington state. She has made frequent appearances on radio and national television, including: The Oprah Winfrey Show, The View, Dateline NBC, The BBC, Politically Incorrect and Good Morning America. A New York Times best-selling author, her books include The Gender of Sexuality, The Great Sex Weekend, American Couples, Love Between Equals: How Peer Marriage Really Works, and Everything You Know About Love and Sex is Wrong? Twenty-Five Relationship Myths Redefined to Achieve Happiness and Fulfillment in Your Intimate Life. Dr. Schwartz has written the monthly column "Sex and Health" for Glamour Magazine, with coauthor Dr. Janet Lever, for more than seven years, as well as a weekly column called "Sex.Net with Dr. Pepper" for Microsoft Corporation's One Click Away.
Cheryl Smithgall is a Research Fellow at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. Her work spans the areas of child welfare, education, and children's mental health, incorporating the perspectives of both social service systems and family systems. Her early work at Chapin Hall was with the National Evaluation of Family Preservation and Reunification Services. She has since led several projects examining educational issues for children involved with the child welfare system and mental health service utilization among children in child welfare placements or kinship care families. Dr. Smithgall is currently leading a 5-year evaluation of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services Integrated Assessment program. Dr. Smithgall has taught as a part-time lecturer at the School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago (SSA), including courses on data analysis and policy management, research methods, and human behavior and the social environment. She holds an M.A. in psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from SSA. Prior to her work at SSA and Chapin Hall, Dr. Smithgall was a child protective caseworker in Portland, Maine.
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Angela Smith Grossman
Angela Smith Grossman began her public service in 1991 in her home community of Lafayette, Indiana. During the course of the next 15 years she held various positions within State government working with families and partnering with the community to improve the quality of medical care, education and employment opportunities for public assistance families. She led the local initiative for the Division of Family and Children to expand medical coverage to children and pregnant women and met goals to enroll nearly 8,000 new patients into that program. As a Board member of Heartford House, the local child forensic interviewing facility she was able to establish multi-disciplinary teams of law enforcement, prosecutors and child protective services with the goal to improve the quality and care of children that were victims of sex crimes. Protocols that she developed and collaborations built have sustained across systems for almost 13 years and are firmly institutionalized into the community investigation of sexual assault. In 2004, she left local office field work to join staff at the capital as the State Child Welfare Policy and Program Manager in the Bureau of Family Protection and Preservation. In this capacity, she was able to gain greater statewide understanding of the variances in child welfare practice and the impacts of community culture and resources in overcoming barriers for families. She was asked in April of 2005 to return to her home community in Tippecanoe County and assume the position as the Director for the Department of Child Services after the brutal beating death of a four year old girl. Since that time, she has led the local office during the statewide reform of child welfare to tremendous transformation. Tippecanoe County’s practice and successful outcomes for child permanency are recognized as superior examples of best practice in Indiana’s child welfare efforts and the community engagement of the Department modeled by peer counties as mechanisms to improve the conditions of children. Angela has been pivotal in her contributions to the local early intervention efforts of “Our Kids” and promotion of the Search Institutes 40 Developmental Assets Model as a common community language. She has served on the executive planning committee for the annual child summit, contributed to two white papers sponsored by “Our Kids “and facilitated community meetings to exchange ideas and planning for the improved prevention and interventions with children in Tippecanoe County. She continues to champion reform in child welfare through community involvement. She seeks to help every public citizen understand their role and impact not just to child abuse and neglect but in the overall well-being and long term view of children in Tippecanoe County.
Julie Spielberger is a Research Fellow with expertise in child development and early childhood education, particularly emergent literacy, school readiness, the role of play in children's learning and development, and improving program quality and professional development. She recently completed a 6-year longitudinal study of patterns of service use and their relationship to family functioning and child development, particularly as they pertain to healthy child development and school readiness. She currently is leading evaluations of several early childhood system-building initiatives designed to improve the coordination and quality of a range of services, including home visitation programs, health care, and early care and education. Previous work includes an evaluation of a school-based behavioral health program, research on children's literacy development in afterschool programs, and a national evaluation of an initiative to strengthen youth development and leadership in public libraries in low-income areas. Prior to joining Chapin Hall, Dr. Spielberger worked extensively in the training of Head Start teachers and as a researcher and consultant with Head Start family literacy programs. She has taught at Harold Washington College, Loyola University Chicago, the Erikson Institute, and the University of Chicago. She also managed consumer research for Playskool Toys, Inc. She received her Ph.D. in Child Development from the Erikson Return to Conference Program
Jim Spilsbury is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Center for Clinical Investigation's Academic Development Core at Case Western Reserve University. He received a PhD in Anthropology from Case Western Reserve University and an MPH in Health Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests involve understanding how the socio-cultural environment in which children grow shapes their health and well-being. He is currently investigating how social and cultural factors, including exposure to violence affects children's sleep and, consequently, other aspects of children's psychological and social functioning. Jim has also participated in mixed-methods research examining the effects of neighborhood context on child maltreatment, and he has conducted ethnographic research with children on their perceptions of neighborhoods and the links between these perceptions and children's help-seeking behavior. Return to Conference Program
VIVIAN TSENG is Vice President of Program at the William T. Grant Foundation where she leads the foundation's grantmaking. Dr. Tseng spearheads the Foundation's initiative on the use of research in policy and practice, and was instrumental in developing the foundation's interests in understanding and improving youth's social settings. She also oversees the William T. Grant Scholars Program and has significantly expanded its mentoring component. She was formerly Assistant Professor in Psychology and Asian American Studies at California State University, Northridge. She received her Ph.D. in community and Developmental Psychology from New York University in 2001 and her B.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research at the Foundation has focused on evidence-based policy and practice and social setting theory, measurement, and intervention. Her prior empirical work examined the role of immigration, race and culture in youths' and their families' experiences in U.S. society. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Community Psychology, Child Development, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of Marriage and the Family, and the Handbooks of Parenting, Asian American Psychology, and 21st Century Education. Return to Conference Program
Steve Wilson, PhD
Steve Wilson's research and teaching focus is on interpersonal and family communication, social influence, and conflict/negotiation. Much of his recent research focuses on parent-child relationships from toddlerhood through adolescence. This work tries to understand patterns of parent-child interaction that predict positive outcomes for children (e.g., social competence, school readiness, and resiliency) as opposed to negative child outcomes (e.g., abuse or neglect, problems relating with family and peers). For the past few years, Dr. Wilson has led an evaluation research team for an intergenerational learning program (similar to Early Head Start) that promotes positive parenting and children's school readiness. The program serves low-income families where parents have limited formal education but clear educational goals. In collaboration with the Military Family Research Institute (MFRI) at Purdue, Dr. Wilson has led a second team evaluating their "Passport" program for children in families where a parent has returned recently from military deployment. Based on models of family resiliency, the program rotates children through three interactive stations where they practice skills related to talking about feelings, coping with stress, and managing conflict with similar-aged peers. Aside from evaluating program implementation and outcomes, the team is exploring how family communication patterns are associated with children's resilience in the face of stressors that occur during the military parent's deployment and reunion. Aside from family communication, Dr. Wilson is interested in influence, negotiation, and relationships in the workplace. He has collaborated on projects exploring how employees attempt to influence their supervisors as well as what how negotiators reach integrative as opposed to distributive outcomes.
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