Dr. Heather L. McCauley, ScD
Dr. McCauley is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at Michigan State University. She earned her master's degree in global health and doctoral degree in social epidemiology from Harvard University. Dr. McCauley’s research portfolio, with approximately $7.5 million in active/current federal funding, focuses on violence prevention at multiple levels of the social ecology. Specifically, her team is focused on community-level mobilization to promote the rights and safety of children; implementation and evaluation of a theatre-focused intervention among young adults incarcerated in New York City; policy evaluation and technical assistance to promote school climates where youth can thrive; expanding assessment of minority stress among trans and gender diverse adults; evaluation of a gender transformative violence prevention curriculum in college athletics; and evaluation of bystander intervention programs among youth in Georgia. Over the last decade, she has served on multiple NIH-, NIJ-, and CDC-funded teams focused on randomized controlled trials of violence prevention interventions in college health centers, family planning clinics, school-based health centers, and high school athletics programs. She has authored or co-authored more than 80 journal articles and book chapters on these topics in outlets spanning a variety of health and social science disciplines. Nationally, she is Associate Editor of the multidisciplinary research journal Psychology of Violence and is on the Editorial Boards of Violence Against Women and Journal of Family Violence. She is a grant reviewer for the National Institute of Justice and the National Institutes of Health. Since 2013, Dr. McCauley has served on the Board of Trustees at St. Lawrence University.
Dr. Joanne Smith-Darden, PhD, MSW
Dr. Smith-Darden received doctorates in Social Work and Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2008 and draws from 40 years of experience in the fields of special education, speech and language pathology, social work, and developmental psychology. She’s trained, practiced, consulted, and evaluated service delivery in a variety of settings including; schools, non-profit community agencies, rehabilitation facilities, hospitals, and the Michigan Bureau of Juvenile Justice. She is an applied federally funded researcher and interdisciplinary scholar, holding the Ruth T. Koehler Endowed Professorship in Children’s Services at the Michigan State University School of Social Work. She is also affiliate faculty in the MSU Center for Gender in Global Context. Her research focuses on examining the etiology of intimate partner violence within evolving contexts – including early relational experiences, social norms, gender norms, and the influence of both masculine and feminine discrepancy stress on behavioral trajectories. Dr. Smith-Darden is a published author in the fields of social work, psychology, and public health, presenting her work locally, nationally, and internationally; and is a grant reviewer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
She has significant expertise in building community partnerships and implementing longitudinal community engaged research projects – from conceptualization and design, implementation, analysis, and evaluation. Dr. Smith-Darden is currently Principal Investigator on two CDC-funded studies -- an evaluation of sexual violence policy implementation in Michigan school districts and “Youth Empowerment Solutions for Healthy Relationships (YES-HR),” a four-year prevention implementation study. She is also Co-Investigator on a CDC-funded evaluation of a social marketing campaign to reduce sexual harassment and bullying in Georgia high schools (PI: Reidy) and on an NICHD-funded RO3 focused on longitudinal trajectories of electronic dating abuse (PI: Fleming). She previously served as Principal Investigator on, “Strengthening Supports for Healthy Adolescent Relationships and Environments (SHARE): A Gender-Sensitive, Mixed Methods Analysis of Protective Factors for Intimate Partner Violence”, a CDC Cooperative Agreement that provided foundational etiologic data for YES-HR.
She has significant expertise in building community partnerships and implementing longitudinal community engaged research projects – from conceptualization and design, implementation, analysis, and evaluation. Dr. Smith-Darden is currently Principal Investigator on two CDC-funded studies -- an evaluation of sexual violence policy implementation in Michigan school districts and “Youth Empowerment Solutions for Healthy Relationships (YES-HR),” a four-year prevention implementation study. She is also Co-Investigator on a CDC-funded evaluation of a social marketing campaign to reduce sexual harassment and bullying in Georgia high schools (PI: Reidy) and on an NICHD-funded RO3 focused on longitudinal trajectories of electronic dating abuse (PI: Fleming). She previously served as Principal Investigator on, “Strengthening Supports for Healthy Adolescent Relationships and Environments (SHARE): A Gender-Sensitive, Mixed Methods Analysis of Protective Factors for Intimate Partner Violence”, a CDC Cooperative Agreement that provided foundational etiologic data for YES-HR.