Duane E. Thomas Assistant Professor   duanet@gse.upenn.edu

Education
1996: B.S., Psychology, Virginia Tech University
1999: M.S., Clinical Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University
2003: Ph.D., Clinical Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University
2003, 2004: Postdoctoral Fellow, Johns Hopkins University

Areas of Expertise
At-risk children and youth
Academic-community partnerships
Clinical and educational psychology
Violence prevention

Professional Biography
Dr. Thomas serves as one of the core faculty in the Applied Psychology and Human Development Division. He has a diverse professional background that includes providing a range of psychological services for children, youth, and families from diverse backgrounds and participating in large-scale community-based violence prevention research. Dr. Thomas joined Penn GSE in the fall of 2005. His courses address topics such as professional development and sociocultural factors in the provision of applied psychology.

Although trained as a general scientist-practitioner, Dr. Thomas has been developing specialization in three key areas: youth violence prevention research, partnership-based methodologies, and the identification of risk and protective factors for urban African-American children and youth. His interest in these areas was engendered, in part, through his doctoral training at Penn State University, where he worked as a research assistant for the Children, Youth and Families Consortium and the Fast Track Program, a multi-site program for the prevention of conduct disorders. His training has also included collaborating with key investigators at the Hopkins Center for Early Intervention and Prevention and the Hopkins-Morgan Center for Health Disparities on community-based risk-prevention while completing a two-year postdoctoral fellowship sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). As part of this training experience, Dr. Thomas partnered with the aforementioned centers, various faculty from the departments of Health Policy & Management and Mental Health at JHSPH, local community agencies, and not-for-profit community-based organizations to develop preventive interventions for urban children and youth at risk for academic failure, delinquency, and serious antisocial behavior. He is currently a Co-Investigator with the Philadelphia Collaborative Violence Prevention Center (PCVPC), an initiative funded through a cooperative agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to build sustainable and mutually beneficial collaborations between academic-based scientists and community members to enhance resiliency and reduce the frequency and impact of youth violence, injury, and death.  Dr. Thomas serves on the Centerpiece Research Project committee and is one the lead investigators of this interdisciplinary effort to develop, implement, and evaluate violence prevention programming for youth in West and Southwest Philadelphia using community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodology.

Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Thomas is interested in the identification of early risk factors for the development of conduct problems in children, as well as the development of prevention efforts to preempt this onset. Specifically, his research has focused on elucidating classroom effects on the early development of serious aggressive behavior problems for children. His research has also investigated sociocultural protective factors contributing to resiliency in urban African-American youth exposed to high levels of community violence and related environmental risks. His current projects involve investigating the affects of cultural socialization and emotional reactivity on classroom behavioral adjustment among African American youth and using principles of CBPR to develop and test the impact of a multi-stage violence prevention program for youth 10-14 years of age.  Current work also involves developing of a scale to assess disparities in teacher expectations and practices in secondary-school classrooms that are linked to externalizing behaviors among youth.

Selected Publications
Thomas, D. E., Bierman, K. L., & the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group (2006). Development & psychopathology: The impact of classroom aggression on the development of aggressive behavior problems in children. Development and Psychopathology, 18(2), 471-487.

Thomas, D. E., Townsend, T. G., & Belgrave, F. Z. (2003). The influence of cultural and racial identification on the psychosocial adjustment of inner city African-American children in school. The American Journal of Community Psychology, 32(3/4), 217-228.
 

*Members of the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group are Karen L. Bierman (Pennsylvania State University), John D. Coie (Duke University), Kenneth A. Dodge (Duke University), E. Michael Foster, (Pennsylvania State University), Mark T. Greenberg (Pennsylvania State University), John E. Lochman (University of Alabama), Robert J. McMahon (University of Washington), and Ellen E. Pinderhughes (Tufts University).