Our Team

At the Children’s Data Network, our team consists of people who enjoy work as both “poets and plumbers”. We possess a shared vision of advancing the science of children’s services through a more rigorous use of existing data. Yet vision requires action and implementation. We are committed to the development of the relationships and infrastructure needed to realize the potential of data to improve outcomes for children.

Staff

Emily Putnam-Hornstein

Emily Putnam-Hornstein

Emily Putnam-Hornstein, PhD

Emily is the John A. Tate Distinguished Professor for Children in Need at the University of North Carolina School of Social Work, a Distinguished Scholar at USC, and Co-Director of the CDN. She also maintains a research appointment at the California Child Welfare Indicators Project. Emily’s current research focuses on the application of epidemiological methods to improve the surveillance of non-fatal and fatal child abuse and neglect. Her analysis of large-scale, linked administrative data has provided insight into where scarce resources may be most effectively targeted and informs understanding of maltreated children within a broader, population-based context. Emily graduated from Yale University with a BA in Psychology, received her MSW from Columbia University, and earned her PhD in Social Welfare from the University of California at Berkeley.

Jacquelyn McCroskey

Jacquelyn McCroskey

Jacquelyn McCroskey, DSW

Jacquelyn is a core team member responsible for creating the Children’s Data Network and currently serves as Co-Director. She holds the John Milner Professorship of Child Welfare at USC’s School of Social Work. Her research focuses on financing and organization of services for children and families, utilization of results and performance measurement, and the efficiency and effectiveness of services. She draws upon both qualitative and quantitative methods to inform policy and guide improvements to government systems providing child welfare, juvenile justice, and early care and education services. Currently, McCroskey co-leads the multi-university child welfare evaluation team funded by Casey Family Programs to support the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services in understanding the impact of a variety of community-based service initiatives, including the DCFS Family Preservation Program and Prevention Initiative Demonstration Project. She also leads a cross-disciplinary research roundtable of researchers from USC, UCLA and Cal State LA in the Los Angeles County Probation Data Project funded by the Keck Foundation under the auspices of the Advancement Project. Through earlier efforts she helped to create the Family Assessment Form, working with the Children’s Bureau of Southern California to develop, test and disseminate a practice-based assessment instrument now used in child and family service settings across the country and abroad. Through her work with county, city and school district policy makers and philanthropists, she has investigated inter-agency collaboration and community partnerships across a broad range of organizations, service areas and settings. Jacquelyn received her DSW from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Rebecca Rebbe

Rebecca Rebbe

Rebecca Rebbe, PhD

Rebecca Rebbe is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Social Work. Rebecca’s research examines the measurement of and community responses to child maltreatment. Her research is informed by 7 years of post-MSW practice working with children and families involved with child welfare systems, in both the public and private sectors. Rebecca has training using demographic methods and specializes in using population-based linked administrative datasets to better understand child maltreatment. She is the principal investigator of the NICHD-funded research project “The impact of COVID-19 on child maltreatment-related medical encounters and system responses using linked administrative data” (1R21HD105907-01). Rebecca earned her PhD in Social Welfare from the University of Washington, received a MSW from Boston College, and has a master’s degree in education from Harvard University.

Regan Foust

Regan Foust

Regan Foust, PhD

Regan is the Executive Director of the Children’s Data Network. An experienced researcher, project manager, and data translator, she works closely with data, research, and funding partners to pursue and communicate the CDN’s transdisciplinary research agenda, inform childrens’ programs/policies, and build the capacity of government agencies to make better use of their own data. Formerly, as Senior Manager, Data and Research for the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, she managed kidsdata.org, guided development and implementation of child health and well-being initiatives, and stewarded strategic data and communication partnerships. She also comes with prior experience replicating effective youth development interventions and evaluating and improving child welfare and educational programs. Dr. Foust holds a doctorate in Educational Psychology from the University of Virginia and a B.A. in Psychology from U.C. Davis.

John Prindle

John Prindle

John Prindle, PhD

John is a Research Assistant Professor with the Children’s Data Network. His research focuses on longitudinal and predictive modeling of the impacts of maltreatment on child and family services, and on child development. Prior to working with the CDN, John developed theory guided exploration methods to combine structural modeling and data-mining techniques to examine covariance structure heterogeneity. He is also interested in models of growth and change, measurement models, and studying the impact of incomplete data in biasing statistical tests. John graduated from the University of California, San Diego with BS/BA degrees in Psychology and Economics, and from the University of Southern California with a PhD in Psychology.

Andrea Lane Eastman

Andrea Lane Eastman

Andrea Lane Eastman, PhD

Andrea Lane Eastman has been a research assistant professor with the Children’s Data Network at USC since 2019. She is currently leading a portfolio of research for the Children’s Data Network funded through grants from the Reissa Foundation and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and stewarding a number of new data partnerships, including with the Los Angeles County Probation Department. Dr. Eastman is also Project Co-Director of the Transition Age Youth Research and Evaluation Hub at UC Berkeley with Professor Mark Courtney. The Transition Age Youth Hub is being developed to support the capacity of the California Department of Social Services and county child welfare agencies to use research to improve policy and practice targeting transition age youth living in and exiting foster care. Her scholarship has been informed by her previous work in the California State Senate where she served as a legislative aide and committee consultant on several state initiatives surrounding health and human services and public safety. She graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s in Psychology, received her master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy from Pepperdine University, and earned a PhD in Social Work from USC. While obtaining her master’s degree, she provided therapy for families who experienced child maltreatment.

Jonathan Hoonhout

Jonathan Hoonhout

Jonathan Hoonhout, BFA

Jonathan Hoonhout is the Chief Operating Officer of the Children’s Data Network, where he facilitates communication and dissemination efforts, maintenance of data use agreements and research protocols, and timely completion of grant deliverables for this university-based research project. His research interests include the experiences, public service interactions, and outcomes of homeless youth and families. Before joining the CDN in 2014, Jonathan served as the Grants Director and Company Manager of the Washington Ensemble Theatre in Seattle, Washington. Jonathan received his BFA from Cornish College of the Arts.

Huy Nghiem

Huy Nghiem

Huy Nghiem, MS

Huy Nghiem is the Research Programmer at Children’s Data Network. He participates in research projects by developing programs for large and complex data from various sources. He functions as liaison between scientists and IT analysts to design and enhance systems to satisfy research specifications. Huy has had experience in data analytics and administrative procedures in various fields of healthcare. He holds dual Bachelor degrees in Applied Mathematics and Public Health Sciences from University of California, Irvine and a Master degree in Software Engineering from the California State University, Fullerton.

Stephanie Cuccaro-Alamin

Stephanie Cuccaro-Alamin

Stephanie Cuccaro-Alamin, PhD

Stephanie is a Research Associate at the Children’s Data Network. She also holds a part-time appointment as a Research Associate at the California Child Welfare Indicators Project at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include child welfare services, poverty, and the use of linked administrative data for program evaluation and policy research. Dr. Cuccaro-Alamin has extensive experience linking statewide administrative data for research purposes. Past linkages have included vital statistics records, public assistance data, wage data, and child welfare data. Most recently her work has focused on linking child welfare and wage data to examine long-term employment outcomes for youth exiting foster care.

Michael N. Mitchell

Michael N. Mitchell

Michael N. Mitchell, PhD

Michael is a Statistical Advisor for the Children’s Data Network and a Senior Statistician at the Veterans Administration, working on multiple research projects focused on sleep research. This research helps Veterans to improve their quality of sleep as well as improving our knowledge about effective treatments for poor sleep quality. He is actively involved in every phase of these research projects — research design, grant writing, data cleaning, data preparation, statistical analysis, interpretation of results, and writing of manuscripts. Previously, he worked for 12 years as a statistical consultant and manager of the UCLA ATS statistical consulting group, where he envisioned, designed and contributed to the UCLA Statistical Consulting Resources website. He is the author of three books — A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics, Data Management Using Stata: A Practical Handbook, and Interpreting and Visualizing Regression Models using Stata. He is working on his fourth book, Stata for the Behavioral Sciences due for release in 2015.

Fellows & Students

Vanessa Akosah

Vanessa Akosah

Vanessa Akosah

Vanessa is a research assistant for the Children’s Data Network and a 2nd year master’s in public health student at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Her interests include older adult dental care, aging, and their intersection with the social determinants of health. Her previous work as a dentist was dedicated to improving clinical experiences for pediatric and geriatric patients through engagement. She has worked with Access Dental Care to employ qualitative analysis and community engagement principles to produce an Oral Health Diagnosis of Southeastern North Carolina, with some focus on special care populations. Vanessa received a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology and a Bachelor of Dental Surgery from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and a certificate in Child Protection from the Institute of Human Rights and Social Policy in Ghana.

Wan-Ting Chen

Wan-Ting Chen

Wan-Ting Chen, MS

Wan-Ting is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the department of Social Work and works as a research assistant for the Children’s Data Network. Her research interests include substance abuse, child maltreatment, and maternal/child health. Previously, she worked as a research assistant at Center for Neuropsychiatric Research, National Health Research Institutes in Taiwan. Wan-Ting received her master’s in Public Health from National Yang-Ming University and her bachelor’s in Medical Sociology and Social Work from Chung Shan Medical University in Taiwan.

Kelsey Cohn

Kelsey Cohn

Kelsey Cohn

Kelsey Cohn is a Graduate Research Assistant for the Children’s Data Network and is currently a Master of Public Health candidate in the Global Health concentration at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. She engaged in qualitative research on the healthcare and racial experiences of people who used heroin and were homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic through the University of Kentucky. She facilitated a thorough literature review on the commercial sexual exploitation of children in San Jose, Costa Rica with Fundación CEPPA and co-led a community-based workshop on victim identification and trauma-informed care for local professionals. Before joining the CDN in 2023, Kelsey worked as an Adult Mental Health Case Manager at Ravenwood Health in Chardon, Ohio. Kelsey is a Semester at Sea alumna and received her Bachelor of Public Health from the University of Kentucky.

Tenia Davis

Tenia Davis

Tenia Davis, MSW

Tenia is Director of the California Social Work Education Center’s (CalSWEC) Child Welfare In-Service Training Program. Previously, Tenia served as Training and Evaluation Specialist at CalSWEC, facilitating the evaluation agenda of the statewide Common Core for new social workers and Supervisor Core for newly promoted supervisors, and chairing the National Human Services Training Evaluation Symposium (NHSTES) Steering Committee. Tenia currently leads the Child Welfare In-Service Training Program that focuses on development of the public social services workforce through providing technical assistance and facilitating collaboration between the regional training academies to improve training outcomes. Tenia received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley and earned her MSW at the University of Pennsylvania (SP2).

Ivy Hammond

Ivy Hammond

Ivy Hammond, MSW

Ivy Hammond is a research associate with the Children’s Data Network. In addition, she is a current PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley, where she works as a graduate researcher for the California Child Welfare Indicators Project. Her research focuses on child protection and maltreatment prevention efforts, with a particular emphasis on commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC). Prior to pursuing a PhD, Ivy worked for the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services as an Emergency Response child welfare worker. Ivy received her MSW from the University of Southern California and received a BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College.

Claire McNellan

Claire McNellan

Claire McNellan, MPH

Claire is a research assistant for the Children’s Data Network and a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the department of Social Work. Her research interests include child welfare and maternal/child health. She has worked at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the Public Health Foundation of India, and the National Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA)/Guardians ad Litem (GAL) Association for Children. Claire received her master’s in public health from the University of Washington and her bachelor’s in Neuroscience from Colorado College.

Julia Reddy

Julia Reddy

Julia Reddy, MA

Julia is a research intern for the Children’s Data Network and a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School for International Public Health in the Maternal and Child Health Department. Her research interests include families impacted by substance use disorders and intersections between families and public service systems. Previously, Julia served as the Women and Families Service Coordinator for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Substance Addiction Services, where she focused on improving the structural design of addiction treatment and community-based service systems to better serve women, perinatal women, and families. Julia received a master’s degree from the Eliot-Pearson Department of Human Development and Child Study at Tufts University and a BA from Duke University.

Himal Suthar

Himal Suthar

Himal Suthar, MS

Himal is a research assistant at the Children’s Data Network and a doctoral student at the USC Keck School of Medicine in the Department of Biostatistics.  His research interests include health disparities, record linkage, and machine learning methods.  Before his doctoral program, Himal was a Data Scientist with the Children’s Data Network, where he worked end to end with the research team, contributing to data preparation, analyses, and modeling.  Himal’s past experience includes performing statistical analyses and building data visualizations in online advertising, IT consulting, and digital health startups.  Himal received his BS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California and his Master’s in Data Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Researchers

Avanti Adhia

Avanti Adhia

Avanti Adhia, PhD

Avanti Adhia is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center (HIPRC) at the University of Washington. She consults with the Children’s Data Network on intimate partner and domestic violence-related projects. Her background is in social epidemiology, social determinants of health, quantitative methods, intimate partner violence, and adolescent health. The overall goal of her research is to prevent intimate partner violence (IPV) by understanding the causes and consequences of IPV in addition to the role of policies and interventions in preventing and reducing violence. Avanti recently completed a 2-year fellowship on an NICHD T32 pediatric injury training and was awarded a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from NICHD to study the effectiveness of state IPV laws on school-based prevention and response in reducing the prevalence of adolescent IPV. Avanti earned her BS in Applied Mathematics from Columbia University and her ScD in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University.

Eunhye Ahn

Eunhye Ahn

Eunhye Ahn, PhD

Eunhye is an Assistant Professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. Eunhye is a Social Work Data Scientist whose research is focused on leveraging data science to improve the outcomes of children and families. Eunhye has developed a transdisciplinary skillset that integrates policy knowledge in child welfare with technical training in data science. Eunhye earned her Ph.D. in Social Work from the University of Southern California, MSW from Monash University in Australia, and B.A. in Business from Yonsei University in South Korea.

Jason Baron

Jason Baron

Jason Baron, PhD

Jason Baron is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Duke University and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining Duke, Baron was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Baron is an applied microeconomist interested in topics in child welfare, the economics of education, and the economics of crime. His work has been published in leading economics journals such as the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and Journal of Public Economics. His research findings have also been covered by major media outlets including CNN, The New York Times, and Forbes.

Mark Courtney

Mark Courtney

Mark Courtney, PhD

Mark is a Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. He is a faculty affiliate of Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, where he served as Director from 2001 to 2006. Mark is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and is a Society for Social Work and Research Fellow. He received the 2010 Peter W. Forsythe Award for leadership in public child welfare from the National Association of Public Child Welfare Administrators and is currently a member of the Committee on Improving the Health, Safety, and Well-Being of Young Adults of the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. His fields of interest include child welfare policy and services, the connection between child welfare services and other institutions serving families living in poverty, the transition to adulthood for vulnerable populations, and the professionalization of social work. Before moving into academia, Mark worked in various capacities providing group home care to abused and neglected adolescents in California. He has served as a consultant to the federal government, state departments of social services, local public and private child welfare agencies, and the philanthropic community. Mark received his PhD, MSW and BA from the University of California at Berkeley. He also received an MA in Clinical Psychology from the John F. Kennedy University.

Megan Finno-Velasquez

Megan Finno-Velasquez

Megan Finno-Velasquez, PhD, MSW

Megan Finno-Velasquez, PhD, MSW, is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at New Mexico State University in Albuquerque, NM. Dr. Finno-Velasquez completed her PhD in Social Work at USC in 2015, and spent the following year as post-doctoral fellow with USC and the CDN. Her research interests center broadly around Latino child well-being, community level maltreatment prevention strategies, and improving service system response to the needs of immigrant families at risk of child maltreatment. Dr. Finno-Velasquez’s current work examines potential reasons for geographic variations in maltreatment referrals in Southern California. She is also part of a team analyzing structured risk decision making data in the child protective services system in CA. Dr. Finno-Velasquez received her MSW from New Mexico Highlands University in 2007, and has a BS in Psychology and Spanish from the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign.

Denise Herz

Denise Herz

Denise Herz, PhD

Denise Herz, Ph.D., currently serves as the Associate Dean for the Rongxiang Xu College of Health and Human Services at California State University, Los Angeles. Prior to serving in this capacity, she was a Professor in and Director of the School of Criminal Justice & Criminalistics at Cal State Los Angeles. Dr. Herz has been actively engaged in research locally and nationally since 1996. Her primary area of research is in juvenile justice, with a particular emphasis on integrating systems to improve outcomes for youth who touch both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems (dual system youth). Since arriving in Los Angeles in 2002, Dr. Herz has worked regularly with Los Angeles County agencies to improve practices for dual system youth and to assess Probation practices and programs in order to improve outcomes for all Probation-involved youth. She currently serves as Co-PI for the OJJDP Dual Systems Youth Study and Co-Research Director for the City of Los Angeles Gang Reduction and Youth Development Office. At the national level, she served as a consultant to the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, participating in many initiatives including but not limited to leading the development and implementation of the Crossover Youth Practice Model Research Component. Dr. Herz received her MA and Ph.D. in Criminology from the University of Maryland at College Park. 

Jeannie Huang

Jeannie Huang

Jeannie Huang, MD, MPH

Jeannie Huang, MD, MPH is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California San Diego. She is a subspecialist trained in pediatric gastroenterology and is Medical Director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Rady Children’s Hospital. She is also a Physician Informaticist at Rady Children’s Hospital. The primary focus of Dr. Huang’s research and clinical work to date has been to improve health outcomes in children and adolescents suffering from chronic disease. In particular, she has focused her recent research endeavors on how to creatively use emerging technologies including the electronic health record to improve insights into the practice of healthcare and how such insights can be used to improve the quality and reach of healthcare.

Bryn King

Bryn King

Bryn King, MSW, PhD

Bryn King, MSW, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto and an Affiliated Researcher at the Children’s Data Network, University of Southern California and the California Child Welfare Indicators Project, University of California, Berkeley. She received her MSW from the Silver School of Social Work, New York University and her doctorate from the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. At the broadest level, Bryn’s research focuses on the well-being of older children and youth in the child welfare system, particularly those who spend time in foster care.

Cynthia Kuelbs

Cynthia Kuelbs

Cynthia Kuelbs, MD

Cynthia L. Kuelbs, M.D., is the Chief Medical Information Officer at Rady Children’s Hospital and Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She received her undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Minnesota and completed her Pediatric residency at UCSD. Board certified in Pediatrics, Child Abuse Pediatrics and Clinical Informatics, she is interested in using the electronic medical record (EMR) and technology to better understand what factors influence health and healthcare. As a child abuse pediatrician and former Medical Director at the Chadwick Center for Children and Families, she is interested in how mental health trauma affects health and the way in which patients interact with health care and in understanding the impact that social determinants of health, particularly chronic stress and exposure to violence and abuse, have on physical and mental health. She is a proponent of understanding how adverse childhood experiences impact health, as well as ensuring that health care providers screening for these events and working with patients who have experienced them are able to interact with patients in a trauma informed way.

Joe Magruder

Joe Magruder

Joe Magruder, PhD

Joe is an associate specialist for the California Child Welfare Indicators Project. He is a social work researcher who specializes is analyzing longitudinal administrative data to understand children’s experience in the child welfare system. He is especially interested in the long-term effects of child welfare decisions on children’s lives. Joe joined the Child Welfare Indicators Project after working as a child welfare program specialist for the California Department of Social Services for several decades. He earned his PhD in Social Welfare from the University of California at Berkeley.

Stacia Martin-West

Stacia Martin-West

Stacia Martin-West, PhD

Stacia is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee College of Social Work and co-PI for the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), the nation’s first modern guaranteed income experiment. The mixed methods RCT for SEED is funded by the Evidence for Action Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Stacia’s other research priorities are unconditional cash transfers, affordable housing, the feminization of poverty, and income and wealth inequality. Her work has appeared in leading social work and microeconomics journals. Stacia received her BA and MSSW from the University of Tennessee, and her PhD in Social Welfare from the University of Kansas.

Chris Mills

Chris Mills

Chris Mills

Chris Mills is a doctoral student in economics at Princeton University and an affiliated researcher with the Children’s Data Network. He is passionate about using linked administrative data to study the causal effects of child welfare interventions on child and family wellbeing, and his research interests include human capital formation in foster care, foster parent labor supply, and expert decision-making. Chris holds a B.A. in economics and computer science from Cornell University.

Barbara Needell

Barbara	Needell

Barbara Needell, PhD

Barbara is a data outreach and engagement consultant for the CDN and the retired principal investigator of the California Child Welfare Indicators Project (CCWIP) at UC Berkeley. For more than a decade, Barbara led CCWIP’s ongoing collaborations with state and county colleagues to produce and publicly disseminate the data used to support the California Child Welfare Outcomes and Accountability System. She is a former member of California’s Child Welfare Council and former co-chair of the Data Linkage and Information Sharing Committee. In addition to her work for the CDN, Barbara continues to consult nationally with child welfare agencies.

Lindsey Palmer

Lindsey Palmer

Lindsey Palmer, PhD

Lindsey is a postdoctoral fellow at Pennsylvania State’s Child Maltreatment Solutions Network. Her research seeks to understand the nature, extent, and impact of Child Protective Service (CPS) involvement for the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable children, with a particular focus on child neglect. Lindsey graduated from the University of Southern California with an MSW and PhD in Social Work. She has previously worked as a licensed clinical social worker providing mental health services to adolescents involved with the child protection and juvenile justice systems.

Katherine Rittenhouse

Katherine Rittenhouse

Katherine Rittenhouse, M.A.

Katherine Rittenhouse is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of California, San Diego and an affiliated researcher with the Children’s Data Network. Her research combines high-quality administrative data with quasi-experimental identification techniques to study the causes and effects of child maltreatment and child protection system involvement.

Kierra Sattler

Kierra Sattler

Kierra Sattler, PhD

Kierra Sattler is an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Kierra’s research broadly focuses on risk and resilience among families in poverty and families involved in child protective services. She uses both large secondary data and administrative data sources. Kierra incorporates interdisciplinary and quantitative methods to investigate the processes of resilience, the experiences of children in foster care, and the intersection between child care and child protective services. Kierra was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Health Disparities Research Scholars Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her M.A./PhD in Human Development and Family Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin.

Rhema Vaithianathan

Rhema Vaithianathan

Rhema Vaithianathan, PhD

Rhema is co-director of the Centre for Social Data Analytics at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand, where she is also a Professor of Health Economics. Rhema is widely recognized for her ambitious research using linked administrative data for social impact. She led the international research team that developed the Allegheny Family Screening Tool, a child welfare predictive risk modelling tool that has been in use in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania since August 2016. Rhema is leading and collaborating on the development of a number of other US predictive risk modelling tools designed to reduce the adverse effects of social problems including homelessness and child maltreatment. She has held numerous research positions in Australia, Singapore and the US including a Harkness Fellowship at Harvard University. Rhema earned her PhD in economics at the University of Auckland, NZ.

Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster

Daniel Webster, PhD

Daniel is Principal investigator of the California Child Welfare Indicators Project at UC Berkeley. Daniel has provided technical assistance for the past decade in the understanding and use of longitudinal data to promote system improvement to public child welfare agencies in the states of Alaska, California, Florida, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. He is also currently the evaluation liaison for the California grantee (California Partners for Permanency) of the Federal Permanency Innovations Initiative to reduce long-term foster care and he regularly co-instructs courses through the Regional Training Academies on the application of advanced analytics for public child welfare administrators from state and county agencies. Daniel earned his PhD in Social Welfare from the University of California at Berkeley.

Christopher Wildeman

Christopher Wildeman

Christopher Wildeman, PhD

Christopher is an Associate Professor of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology and a faculty fellow at the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, the Center for the Study of Inequality, Court-Key-Bauer Hall, and the Cornell Population Center. Prior to joining Cornell’s faculty, Christopher was an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University and a faculty fellow at the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Since 2013, he has been a visiting fellow at the Bureau of Justice Statistics. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from Princeton University in 2008. From 2008-2010, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar and postdoctoral affiliate in the Population Studies Center (PSC) at the University of Michigan. His research and teaching interests revolve around the consequences of mass imprisonment for inequality, with emphasis on families, health, and children. He is also interested in child welfare more broadly, especially as relates to child maltreatment and the foster care system. He was the 2013 recipient of the Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology.

“Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what no one has thought.”
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, 1937
1150 South Olive Street, Suite 1400
Los Angeles, CA 90015
General Questions
Connect
Newsletter
Sign up for our mailing list to stay up to date with the Children's Data Network's latest research and news developments.

©2020 Datanetwork.org

#