Dorothy Espelage

Dorothy L. Espelage, Ph.D., is William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina. She is the recipient of the APA Lifetime Achievement Award in Prevention Science and the 2016 APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy, and is a Fellow of APS, APA, and AERA. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, awarded the SPR Prevention Science Award in 2020, received a lifetime mentoring award from the National Partnership to End Interpersonal Violence in 2022, and Bully Research Network & World Anti-Bullying Forum Career Achievement Award in 2023. She earned her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Indiana University in 1997. Over the last 30 years, she has authored over 400 peer- reviewed articles, eight edited books, and 115 chapters on bullying, identity-based bullying (e.g., targeting students with disabilities, gender and sexual minority youth) homophobic teasing, sexual harassment, dating violence, social-emotional learning interventions, and adolescent suicide. Her research focuses on translating empirical findings into prevention and intervention programming and she has secured over 50 million dollars of external funding as PI or co-PI. She advises members of Congress and Senate on bully prevention legislation. She conducts regular webinars for CDC, NIH, and NIJ to disseminate research. She has conducted randomized clinical trials to evaluate K-12 social-emotional learning programs to reduce youth aggression, peer-led interventions to address sexual violence and suicidal behaviors, and technology-based bully prevention programs. CDC funded a large-scale RCT evaluating the peer-led universal suicide prevention program – Sources of Strength – in 20 Colorado high schools, and she is co-PI on a large-scale comparative effectiveness trial of Signs of Suicide and Youth Aware Mental Health in 20 North Carolina schools, funded by PCORI.