Research Scientists Child and Family Center

CFC Scientists

Projects and Areas of Expertise

Alison Boyd-Ball, Ph.D., focuses her work on understanding posttraumatic events and how they relate to substance abuse in adolescents and their families, and on designing effective interventions and prevention programs specifically for American Indians. Her intervention research specialty is family-centered interventions and the need for cultural integration and adaptation of local cultural practices into intervention models and research practices.
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The research interests of Allison Caruthers, Ph.D., center on adolescent gender and sexual socialization and their relationship to sexual behavior, sexual risk taking, and emotional well being in adolescence and adulthood. She is examining the distinction between normal, healthy sexual exploration and truly problematic behavior, as well as possible mechanisms by which CFC intervention services reduce risky sexual behavior.
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The research focus of Krista Chronister, Ph.D., is domestic violence prevention and community-based intervention, including women survivors’ economic and vocational development, community mental health interventions with ethnic minority and immigrant families experiencing domestic violence, and couple interventions for young adults at risk for domestic violence and substance use.
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Tom Dishion, Ph.D., founder of the Child and Family Center, conducts research in developmental psychopathology and intervention science. He was formerly a professor in the Departments of Psychology and School Psychology at the University of Oregon and is now on the faculty of Arizona State University. He is interested in understanding how children’s relationships with parents and peers influence the development of problem behavior in children and adolescents. His recent research interests include social neuroscience, with a particular focus on identifying neurocognitive mechanisms underlying self-regulation in interpersonal contexts. He is also interested in applying knowledge of developmental processes to the design of preventive and clinical interventions that reduce conflict and distress in families and improve child and adolescent social and emotional adjustment. He and colleagues are working on developing and testing an ecological approach to child and family mental health interventions in service delivery systems such as public schools.
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Kristina Hiatt Racer, Ph.D., is interested in individual differences in attention and emotion processing and how they interact with contextual factors such as parenting and peers to promote or prevent the development of psychopathology. She is using behavioral and event-related potential techniques to examine individual differences in the development of selective attention and reward/punishment sensitivity in children and adolescents.
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Kavanaugh The research efforts of CFC’s Project Alliance Director Kate Kavanagh, Ph.D., are directed toward understanding effective intervention and prevention practices for improving prosocial child and adolescent outcomes in families across the developmental continuum. She enhances these efforts by focusing on gender, culture, and economic mediators of effective interventions. She has published numerous scientific reports and developed written and video materials for parents of children from toddlerhood to adolescence.

Laura Lee McIntyre, Ph.D., is interested in early identification and treatment of childhood developmental and behavioral problems, with an emphasis on the multiple systems of care that support children (e.g., families, schools, healthcare). Within this broad framework, three specific lines of research emerge: (1) Parent training, education, and support; (2) transition to kindergarten; and (3) child risk factors and family well-being. She is especially interested in early intervention and prevention work with families who have young children with developmental problems who are at risk for negative social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes at home and at school. She is an associate professor in the School Psychology Program at the University of Oregon and a licensed psychologist, certified school psychologist, and board certified behavior analyst. DOWNLOAD CV

Beth Stormshak, Ph.D., is the director of the Child and Family Center and since 1996 has been a faculty member in the University of Oregon College of Education’s Counseling Psychology program. Her early research focused on understanding developmental factors associated with conduct problem behavior, including parenting and peer relations. For the past 10 years, she has been conducting intervention and prevention research. Her work has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the Department of Education, and Centers for Disease Control to enable her to conduct research in schools and Head Start centers. Her focus is on developing and implementing family-centered, school-based interventions to reduce future risk of substance use and antisocial behavior. She currently is the principal investigator on Project Alliance 2, a NIDA-funded program to test the efficacy of the EcoFIT model of intervention during the transition to high school to reduce substance use and problem behavior, and on a CDC-funded grant to collaborate with mental health providers to improve the effectiveness of their services to families. She also serves as the director of the clinic, where she teaches the child and family practicum for doctoral students in counseling, school, and clinical psychology.
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