Ron Avi Astor

University of California, Los Angeles

Professor and Marjorie Crump Chair in Social Welfare

Astor's work has won numerous international research awards from the Society for Social Work Research, the American Psychological Association, the American Educational Research Association, the Military Child Educational Coalition, and other research organizations. He has an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College. Astor is a fellow of APA, AERA, SSWR and an elected member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. He has been involved in consortiums aiming to depolice schools and build systemic resources to provide support and caring schools in communities that have been under-resourced due to systemic racism and prejudice. During the COVID-19 crisis, his work explored school safety before, during, and after the pandemic. In the USA he is currently involved in exploring how the Israel/ Hamas war and the rise of hate is affecting students in K-12 settings. This work explores how schools deal with racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, and other forms of bias and hate fit into a school safety framework. He is leading an effort to study the epidemiology of these hate beliefs in K-12 schools. In the Middle East, along with Jewish and Arab researchers, he partnered with a consortium of 50 Jewish (Secular and Orthodox) and Arab (Muslim, Christian, Druze, and Beduin) schools (with 30,000 students) exploring how culture, religion, democracy, coexistence, diversity, identity, safety affect the safety and perceived safety of teachers, students, and parents in the context of geopolitical conflict. Much of his recent work focuses on the empowerment of students, administrators, teachers, and parents within schools to create welcoming schools-- at scale. He serves on an APA task force exploring how safety impacts teachers, social workers, psychologists, administrators, and school staff's sense of safety. Other cross-cultural studies include understanding the cultural dimensions of school safety in Kosovo, Cameroon, Chile, Taiwan, and China. His work has been funded by the Department of Defense Educational Activity, the National Institutes of Mental Health, the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Israeli Ministry of Education, The Chilean Ministry of Education, two Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowships, University of Michigan, USC, UCLA, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, The Gilbert Foundation, and others.