Who We Are
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 is a core team member responsible for creating the Children’s Data Network and currently serves as Co-Director. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Her work focuses on interactions between policy, practice and research in the child protective services, juvenile justice and early care and education systems, drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods to inform policy and guide improvements to public and private sector service systems. 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 used in child and family service settings across the country and abroad. She serves on the LA County Commission for Children and Families and Policy Roundtable for Child Care and is a member of the First 5 LA Board. She is also a member of California’s Child Welfare Council’s Prevention and Early Intervention Committee and Co-Chairs California’s Community Pathway Advisory Committee. She was inducted into the California Social Work Hall of Distinction in 2023. Jacquelyn received her DSW from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Regan is the Executive Director of the Children’s Data Network and a Senior Research Scientist at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. 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 children’s 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.
Rebecca Rebbe is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina School of Social Work. Rebecca’s research examines the measurement of and community responses to child maltreatment. Her research is informed by seven years of post-MSW practice working with children and families involved with child welfare systems, in both the public and private sectors. Rebecca specializes in using population-based linked administrative datasets and data science techniques to better understand child maltreatment. Rebecca has been the Principal Investigator on research projects funded by the NICHD and CDC. Her work has been published in academic journals, such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Pediatrics, and Child Maltreatment. 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.
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.
John is a Research Associate 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.
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 project. Before joining the CDN in 2014, Jonathan served as the Grants Director, Company Manager, and Co-Artistic Director of the Washington Ensemble Theatre in Seattle, Washington. Jonathan is a graduate of the Original Works theatre program at Cornish College of the Arts.
Huy Nghiem is a Data Scientist at the Children's Data Network. He earned his Master’s degree in Data Science from the University of Southern California and is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on enhancing the interpretability, transparency, and fairness of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. At CDN, he works with large-scale administrative data to generate empirical insights and advance social welfare in partnership with multiple government agencies on research-driven initiatives.
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 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.
"William (Bill) Dawson, MSW
Bill Dawson is the Project Director of the initiative Supporting a Strong Start for California Kids, funded by First 5 California. With the Children’s Data Network, he contributed to the original development and later redesign of the California Strong Start Index. Bill is also the Project Manager of the California Child Welfare Indicators Project (CCWIP) at UC Berkeley. Bill coordinates the development and quarterly updates of the CCWIP website. He provides technical assistance to the California Department of Social Services, California counties, and other states. Bill obtained his BA from McGill University and a Master of Social Welfare (MSW) from UC Berkeley."
Affiliated Researchers
and Students
Dr. Avanti Adhia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. The goal of her research is to prevent interpersonal violence by understanding its causes and consequences and evaluating the role of laws, policies and interventions in reducing violence. Dr. Adhia uses multiple, interdisciplinary methods to examine the social and structural determinants of intimate partner violence and sexual violence, primarily among adolescents and young adults. She is an interdisciplinary researcher committed to conducting research that promotes social justice, maximizes human well-being, and engages communities to enhance the health of marginalized populations.
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 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.
Julie Cederbaum is an associate professor in the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Her work focuses on the impact of childhood adversity and family processes on the well-being of youth. Using a dyad and family systems lens, her research explores the strengths and challenges experienced by diverse families, and ways in which parenting processes and behaviors (i.e. parent–child communication, parental monitoring, parent–child relationship, and parental role modeling) and positively influence mental health, reproductive health, and substance use behaviors in children, adolescents and young adults.
Wan-Ting Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work and a research assistant with the Children’s Data Network. Her program of research leverages administrative data and quantitative methods to document and understand variations in national and state responses to child maltreatment, and accompanying health disparities that may emerge. Wan-Ting has led and participated in collaborative projects between interprofessional scholars and practitioners, both in the U.S. and internationally. Informed by her interdisciplinary training and experience working with large datasets, Wan-Ting’s current research examines the trajectories of substance-exposed infants in the child protection system.
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.
Dr. Finno-Velasquez is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at New Mexico State University. Her research centers around the impact of culturally appropriate maltreatment prevention strategies with immigrant populations and improving child welfare service system response to the needs of immigrant families. Her recent funded research uses a community-based participatory approach to improving access to and relevance of social services for immigrant families with young children in the New Mexico borderlands.
Sarah Font, PhD is an associate professor of sociology and public policy at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on child abuse and neglect, child protection, foster care, health and wellbeing, social policy, and state intervention. Font is currently working on a project investigating the impact of foster care and specific experiences within foster care, on the physical and mental health of children exposed to abuse or neglect.
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, 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.
Dr. King is an Assistant Professor at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, and an affiliated researcher at both the Children’s Data Network, University of Southern California and the California Child Welfare Indicators Project, University of California, Berkeley. Dr. King has over 16 years of clinical experience in a variety of settings, but much of her practice has worked towards addressing the behavioral health impacts of maltreatment and violence among children, adolescents, and adults. At the broadest level, her research examines the epidemiology, service involvement, and outcomes of children and youth who are maltreated and come to the attention of the child protective system in North America.
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 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.
Dr. Claire R. McNellan is an Assistant Professor in the Colorado School of Public Health's Department of Health Systems, Management and Policy at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She studies public child- & family-serving systems, child maltreatment epidemiology, and the role of social policy in promoting maternal & child health. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work. In 2017, she completed an MPH at the University of Washington concurrently with a three-year public health and data science fellowship at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. She attended Colorado College and graduated with distinction in Neuroscience.
Christopher Mills is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO). His research focuses on topics in labor and public economics. Chris uses experiments and linked administrative data to study and improve service delivery, with an interest in human-algorithm interaction and investments in children and families. He completed his Ph.D. in Economics at Princeton University.
Lindsey Palmer is an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah College of Social Work. Her research agenda seeks to understand the nature, extent, and impact of Child Protective Service (CPS) involvement on the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable children and adolescents. Her work investigates the characteristics and context of allegations of neglect, adolescent mental health and behavioral crises, and the strengths and limitations of administrative data in capturing the experiences and outcomes of children impacted by CPS. Lindsey graduated from the University of Southern California with an MSW and PhD in Social Work. She previously completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Pennsylvania States’ Child Maltreatment Solutions Network. Her research is informed by her work as a clinical social worker providing mental health services to adolescents impacted by child protection and juvenile justice systems.
Julia is a research intern for the Children’s Data Network and a doctoral candidate 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.
Eric Rice is a professor, the associate dean for research and the founding co-director of the USC Center for AI in Society, a joint venture of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Dr. Rice specializes in social network science and theory, as well as community-based research. His primary focus is on youth experiencing homelessness and how issues of social network influence may affect risk-taking behaviors and resilience. For several years he has worked with colleague Milind Tambe to merge social work science and AI, seeking novel solutions to major social problems such as homelessness and HIV. He received a BA from the University of Chicago, and an MA and PhD in Sociology from Stanford University.
Katherine Rittenhouse is an Assistant Professor the LBJ School of Public Affairs within the University of Texas at Austin. She is an applied microeconomist with research interests in public and labor economics. Her work focuses on issues and policies related to child and family well-being, with a particular focus on the child protection system. She holds a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego.
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.
Himal is a research assistant at the Children’s Data Network and a doctoral student at the USC Keck School of Medicine in the Epidemiology program within the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences. 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.
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 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.
Chris Wildeman is a Professor of Sociology in the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of Public Policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy (by courtesy) at Duke University, where I am also Director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN), hosted by Cornell University and Duke University. Since 2019, he has also been Research Professor at the ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Prior to joining Duke’s faculty in 2020, he was Professor of Policy Analysis and Management (PAM) and Sociology (by courtesy), Director of the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (BCTR), and Associate Vice Provost for the Social Sciences at Cornell University. Prior to that, he was Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from Princeton University in 2008 and my postdoctoral training from 2008 to 2010 as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan.