PolicyLab

Brooke Paskewich is a faculty member at PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). She is also affiliated with The Center for Violence Prevention at CHOP as a research scholar and co-director of School-Based Bullying Prevention and Social-Emotional Learning Research. Additionally, Dr. Paskewich is a research assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Paskewich’s research focuses on promoting positive social-emotional health and development of children through the provision of evidenced-based supports and interventions. She has centered this work in the prevention and intervention of aggressive and bullying behaviors in urban school settings through a range of indicated and universal research programs designed for 3rd to 5th grade students, school counselors and teachers. Dr. Paskewich has expertise in community-based participatory research (CBPR) and qualitative research, which she has applied to a portfolio of five NIH- and IES-funded school-based intervention development studies. Dr. Paskewich is currently conducting developmental research related to social-emotional learning and anti-aggression/bullying programming targeting 1st and 2nd grade youth, a racial microaggression intervention for hospital-based biomedical research staff, and a multi-tiered school-based mental health (SBMH) program.

Relatedly, Dr. Paskewich has extensive expertise conducting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in schools. She has directed the implementation of two different RCTs funded by NIH and IES testing the efficacy of interventions as conducted by trained research team facilitators. She is currently conducting research that has moved beyond efficacy trials into effectiveness trials testing interventions in real-world conditions, including two new NIH R01 RCTs testing interventions when school-led (e.g., by a teacher or school counselor) with coaching from our research team. The first is a 40-school RCT testing the effectiveness of a school-led indicated aggression prevention program with coaching, and the second is a 32-school RCT testing the effectiveness of a coaching model for training teachers to detect, prevent and intervene with bullying in the classroom. She is an MPI on a RCT study under review by the CDC that will test the effectiveness and sustainability of a universal bullying prevention program that she and her team adapted over the last three years.

Finally, Dr. Paskewich conducts research to bridge the gap between evidenced-based intervention research and practice in real-world settings. She has leveraged a large portfolio of intervention research studies over the last fifteen years to develop expertise in responsive methods for overcoming recruitment barriers and limiting sample bias in school-based research. She has also developed intervention implementation strategies that balance core features required for fidelity with a flexibility that is responsive to the unique needs of schools to maximize intervention feasibility, generalizability, and sustainability. With a focus on historically under-served schools, Dr. Paskewich’s research assesses factors (e.g., treatment fidelity and school, implementer, and program characteristics) that are associated with intervention outcomes and that facilitate or impede program uptake and fidelity, and how schools can independently implement and sustain evidence-based programs.

Dr. Paskewich earned a Master of Science in Counseling Psychology and Human Services in 2002 and a PsyD in Clinical Psychology in 2008, both from Chestnut Hill College. She completed an APA-accredited pre-doctoral internship at The Institute for Children and Family Health (formerly The Children’s Psychiatric Center) in Miami, Fla., and received post-doctoral intervention research training at CHOP.