Current Research Projects

Executive Functioning and Resilience

Longitudinal investigation of overcoming adversity among adolescent students with Prof. Nelly Tournaki, Dr. Shelly Blackman, Dr. JoAnn Sacks, Dr. Stan Sacks, Dr. Ken Byalin, and Mr. Chris Zilinski.
In close collaboration with a New York City-based charter school, my colleagues and I are using multi-dimensional, longitudinal models to investigate the roles of executive functioning, dialectical behavior therapy, and other factors that help disadvantaged adolescents to succeed academically. The rich data also provide an excellent—and nearly unique—opportunity to study the long-term interplay between protective factors and various intervention strategies among a large, diverse group of students; this helps us to advise the school how to invest their limited resources. We are excited about the insights we are finding—and the effect we hope they have on improving lives.

Humane Education, Caring-for-Life Education, and Animal-Assisted Activities

Efficacy of humane education in collaboration with ACTAsia
In collaboration with ACTAsia, a leading non-profit organization active in the South and East Asia, this series of evaluations assesses the effect of an integrated humane education lesson module on elementary students’ attitudes about environmental social, and animal welfare issues. We are also investigating the effects of these interventions on students’ psycho-social development, finding some of the first good evidence for these programs' abilities to improve children’s prosocial behaviors. The scale of these evaluations is unprecedented in humane/caring-for-life education in any part of the world; that it focuses on them across Asia makes it truly ground-breaking.

Animal-Assisted Interventions in collaboration with Profs. Lieve Meers and Frank O. Ödberg both of Ghent University’s Laboratory for Ethology, Prof. Simona Normando of the Dipartimento di Scienze Sperimentali Veterinarie at the Università di Padova, and others.
Including both clinical and research projects, this area primarily centers around establishing a strong theoretical foundation for Animal-Assisted Interventions so that this diverse and quickly-growing field can develop in an organized way. My colleagues have done an excellent job of bridging the often-wide gaps between the field’s researchers and practitioners to ensure safety; planful program creation and implementation; and valid, informative inquiry. Not surprisingly then, subsumed under our efforts are also evaluations of programs both in terms of their efficacy and their ability to maintain the welfare of all involved—especially for the animals employed.

Research Design & Analyses

Collaborations and Consultations
In addition to the main lines of research noted just above, I also work with several colleagues on a range of other, social & medical science projects. My contributions to these projects center on designing field-based studies that maintain high scientific standards and conducting statistical analyses that adhere to the best and most-current recommendations of statistics and psychometrics—primarily general & generalized linear models, multi-level & structural-equation modeling, and traditional psychometrics & IRT analyses.

These projects have included, e.g., community and mental health research, sociological studies, nursing research, instrument design & testing, educational research, and language use. Although a minority of these projects have led to publications on which I am a co-author, my goals here are rarely for that: I see this as one of the responsibilities I have to help guide and advance science and understanding.

Previous, completed research projects are outlined in my curriculum vitæ.