Fellows

Melissa Jonson-Reid, PhD

Active | Inducted in 2017

Bio

Melissa Jonson-Reid, Ralph and Muriel Pumphrey Professor of Social Work, practiced in both domestic violence counseling and program administration as a school social worker in California running Foster Youth Services and related programs prior to entering academia. A major focus of her work is understanding how responses to childhood abuse and neglect can be improved to support healthy behavioral, educational and health outcomes. A large part of this work has involved using multi-agency longitudinal administrative data to identify targets of opportunity to leverage existing resources and/or evaluate policy and program efforts. Her work also includes evaluating approaches to maltreatment prevention building on existing home visitation platforms, consultation and evaluation with medical homes for youth in care, and school social work services. At the Brown School, Jonson-Reid is Director of the Center for Violence and Injury Prevention, chair of the Violence and Injury Prevention concentration in the Master of Social Work program and supervises an interdisciplinary Violence and Injury certificate. She also teaches the foundation statistics course in the PhD program, co-teaches a Transdisciplinary Problem-Solving course on child maltreatment, and enjoys mentoring a number of doctoral students. She is author or co-author of over 100 articles, book chapters and books – many of which involve students. She is active in the community, providing free consultation to a number of family and youth services agencies. She is the proud partner in life and work of Dr. Brett Drake and proud mother of two sons Harrison and Thomas.