Ron Avi Astor

Ron Avi Astor holds the Marjorie Crump Chair Professorship in Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs with a joint appointment in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. His work examines the role of the physical, social-organizational, and cultural contexts in schools related to different kinds of bullying and school violence (e.g., sexual harassment, cyberbullying, discrimination hate acts, school fights, emotional abuse, weapon use, teacher/child violence). This work documents the ecological influences of the family, community, school, and culture on different forms of bullying and school violence. This work has been used worldwide. Astor’s studies have included tens of thousands of schools and millions of students, teachers, parents, and administrators. Over the past 20 years, findings from these studies have been published in more than 200 scholarly manuscripts.

Along with his colleague Rami Benbenishty, Astor developed a school mapping and monitoring procedure that is used “at scale” regionally and with local students and teachers to generate “grassroots” solutions to safety problems. The findings of these studies have been widely cited in the international media, in the United States, and in Israel.

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, and an elected member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. Astor is currently working on studies related to COVID19 and School Safety worldwide. He has been involved in consortiums aiming to depolice schools and build systemic resources to provide supports and caring schools in communities that have been under-resourced due to systemic racism and prejudice. Much of his recent work focuses on the empowerment of students, administrators, teachers, and parents within schools to create welcoming schools at scale. He is also on an APA task force centering on teacher and school staff harm that is exploring how the dual pandemic of COVID19 and resources have impacted teachers, social workers, psychologists, administrators, and school staff’s sense of safety. This work is aimed at policy recommendations at the city, state, and national levels.

His work has been funded by the Department of Defense Educational Activity, National Institutes of Mental Health, H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, Israeli Ministry of Education, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship, University of Michigan, USC and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and other foundations.