Dorothy L. Espelage

Dorothy L. Espelage is William C. Friday Distinguished Professor Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies youth violence and conducts large-scale school-based evaluations of social-emotional learning programs. 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. She is a Fellow of APS, APA, and AERA. She earned her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Indiana University in 1997. Over the last 25 years, she has authored over 300 peer- reviewed articles, eight edited books, and 70 chapters on bullying, homophobic teasing, sexual harassment, dating violence, and gang violence. Her research focuses on translating empirical findings into prevention and intervention programming and she has secured over eleven million dollars of external funding. She advises members of Congress and Senate on bully prevention legislation. She conducts regular webinars for CDC, NIH, and NIJ to disseminate research. She authored a 2011 White House Brief on bullying among LGBTQ youth and attended the White House Conference in 2011, and has been a consultant on the stopbullying.gov website and consultant to the National Anti-bullying Campaign, Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). She has presented multiple times at the Federal Partnership to End Bullying Summit and Conference. She is a consultant to the National Institutes of Health Pathways to Prevention Initiative to address bullying and youth suicide. Espelage has appeared on many television news and talk shows and has been quoted in the national print press.