Dawn P Witherspoon Editor

Dawn P. Witherspoon, Ph.D., is the McCourtney Family Early Career Professor in Psychology and Director of PACT (Parents And Children Together), a community-university partnership, at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on the ways in which families and youth are shaped by the contexts in which they are embedded, particularly focusing on how neighborhood, family, and cultural factors affect adolescents’ academic, psychosocial, and behavioral well-being. The crux of her research focuses on the neighborhood context and its relation to other proximal contexts for adolescents and identifies positive characteristics in multiple contexts that are related to adolescent well-being. Her research has been funded by NSF, NIDA, NIGMS, and other entities. Dr. Witherspoon has served on many editorial boards for developmental science and is currently on the editorial board of the American Psychologist and Identity and associate editor for the Journal of Research on Adolescence, where she co-edited a four-part special series, “Dismantling Systems of Racism and Oppression during Adolescence”.

Gabriela Livas Stein, Ph.D.,  Professor and Head of Psychology at UNC Greensboro. Dr. Stein is a licensed clinical psychologist. Dr. Stein’s program of research identifies individual risk and protective processes for Latinx and other minoritized youth when facing cultural stressors (e.g., discrimination, acculturative stress) and seeks to improve mental health treatment access for underserved populations including Latinx families. Her research has been funded by NIDA, NIMH, WT GRANT and PCORI. She is a past Vice President of Programming for the Society of Research on Adolescence, and is on the editorial board of Child Development.