TRANSFORM- Mission and Objectives

Faculty
Cores
Webinars

Resources

Communities of PracticeFactsheets
Domestic Violence
Podcast- Promoting Resilience
Contact

The TRANSFORM Center’s mission is to change the paradigm of child maltreatment prevention from reactive to proactive through research and dissemination. Our core areas include two ground-breaking studies and an expansive research dissemination program.

Project Promise: Promoting Successful Parenting

This TRANSFORM research project is aimed at preventing child maltreatment for at-risk and economically disadvantaged families. The model includes Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) for pregnant or post-partum women to promote improved mother-child relationships, more sensitive parenting, and healthier child development.

Adult Health Study

This TRANSFORM research project will provide new prevention and intervention targets, as well as generating data that will impact policy and practice through a follow-up study of 600 individuals initially assessed in childhood. The project is evaluating the long-term consequences of child maltreatment through analyses of the survivors’ current life status, self-efficacy, cumulative stress, allostatic load, and epigenetic modifications.

Community Engagement & Dissemination

The TRANSFORM Center Community Engagement Core is working to disseminate cutting edge research and practices in child maltreatment to practitioners and parents. Our aim is to connect child maltreatment practitioners, across disciplines, to synthesize evidence-based research from diverse scientific and child welfare fields, and to amplify the work being done to prevent child abuse and promote child wellness through education and outreach.

 

To fulfill its mission, TRANSFORM:

  • Provides infrastructure and access resources to support a multidisciplinary team of translational scientists spanning the fields of developmental psychopathology, intervention science, neuroscience, genetics, and law.
  • Evaluates interventions to foster adaptive parenting and infant outcomes that can be exported to real-world community settings.
  • Considers law as an agent of change in children’s lives by helping legal, child welfare, and medical professionals understand and use this important area of science.
  • Partners with leaders of various community systems-of-care serving high-risk youth to implement evidence-based approaches in high-impact public health settings: courts, medical/mental health offices, child welfare offices, social services, etc.
  • Interfaces with various stakeholder groups across multiple child-serving systems (child welfare, law, education, physical and mental health, law enforcement, advocacy groups, funders and policymakers) to disseminate the products of TRANSFORM research.
  • Provides education, mentoring and training, pilot-funding opportunities, and career development coaching for early career professionals to transmit cutting-edge research and the skills required to translate these findings into effective new therapies and procedures.
  • Disseminates research findings via traditional routes (e.g., publications and presentations at professional conferences) and with additional initiatives (e.g., this website, TRANSFORM-sponsored webinars, podcasts, presence at conferences, social media, and mobile applications).