A major focus of Melissa Jonson-Reid’s work is understanding how to improve the behavioral, educational and health outcomes associated with childhood exposure to trauma, particularly abuse and neglect. Her work responds to child maltreatment as a serious, prevalent public health concern.
Jonson-Reid has used multi-agency administrative data to identify targets of opportunity to leverage existing resources and/or evaluate policy and program efforts to promote healthy outcomes. She partners with community agencies to explore outcomes of interventions designed to support young families and youth involved with child welfare.
Jonson-Reid has practice experience in both domestic violence counseling and program administration as a school social worker in California; she currently provides evaluation consultation for state and community organizations.
At the Brown School, Jonson-Reid is the chair of the Violence and Injury Prevention concentration in the Master of Social Work program and supervises an interdisciplinary Violence and Injury certificate, which involves collaboration with the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies. She also teaches the foundation statistics course in the PhD program, co-teaches a Transdisciplinary Problem-Solving course on child maltreatment, and serves as chair or member of several doctoral student committees.
