May 2017
Jodi Quas, a professor of psychology and social behavior, has won the 2017 Outstanding Community Researcher award from the Institute for Clinical and Translational Science, a campus-wide institute that helps shuttle discoveries from the lab into practice.
The award recognizes a UCI faculty member who has demonstrated commitment to collaborative research partnerships with a community organization.
Quas works to identify ways to intervene in and improve the lives of at-risk children in the U.S. and around the world. In particular, she studies methods of enhancing children's eyewitness memory, the effects of stress and trauma on children's development, and the consequences of legal involvement on child witnesses, victims, and even defendants.
Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the American Psychological Foundation and other government agencies and private foundations.
In 2016, Quas, along with Gene Howard, the executive director of the Orange County Alliance for Children and Families, received a different award from the Campus-Community Research Incubator to launch a research project to determine how much parents understand about the dependency court process and what is required of them following children's removal from home due to maltreatment.
This project builds on earlier work that Quas and her doctoral student, Kyndra Cleveland, conducted on legal attitudes and knowledge in parents attending dependency court hearings. The team is now tracking how parents' attitudes and knowledge relate to their compliance with court orders.