Catherine Bradshaw

Catherine P. Bradshaw, Ph.D., M.Ed., is a University Professor and the Senior Associate Dean in the School of Education and Human Development and is a faculty fellow with the Vice President of Research at the University of Virginia. She has an adjunct appointment in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She holds a doctorate in developmental psychology from Cornell University and a master’s of education from the University of Georgia. Her primary research interests focus on the prevention of behavioral and mental health problems in schools. She has particular interests in bullying and school climate; emotional and behavioral disorders; and the design, evaluation, and implementation of evidence-based prevention programs in schools. She has led over a dozen federally-funded randomized trials of school-based prevention programs, including several studies of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports and social-emotional learning curricula. She has expertise in implementation science and the scale-up of evidence-based programs. She is the co-director of the IES-funded National Center for Rural School Mental Health. She is the editor of the journal Prevention Science and senior associate editor for Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy. She is a coeditor of two editions of the Handbook of School Mental Health (2014; 2023), the editor of the Handbook on Bullying: A Life Course Perspective (2017), and the co-author of Preventing Bullying in Schools: A Social and Emotional Learning Approach to Prevention and Early Intervention (2020). She served on the 2011 White House panel on bullying and helped organize studies for the National Academies of Science, Engineering, & Medicine, including the 2016 consensus study on bullying. She previously chaired a What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) panel on positive behavior support and is currently involved in other WWC panels and practice guides. She has received awards from the Society for Research in Child Development, Society for Research on Adolescence, and Society for Prevention Research, and was the recipient of the 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.