Tracy Evian Waasdorp PhD, MSEd
Tracy Evian Waasdorp is a faculty member at PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and an assistant research professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also affiliated with the Center for Violence Prevention (CVP) at CHOP as the director of Research for School-Based Bullying and Social-Emotional Learning.
Dr. Waasdorp is an expert in childhood aggression and bullying (both in-person and cyber) as well as the design and assessment of school-based interventions. Her programs aim to improve children’s social and emotional skills, reduce bullying and aggression, and help adults promote children’s positive peer relationships. She also has a strong focus on research methodology and related statistics.
She has collaborated on the design and evaluation of three school-based interventions: Preventing Relational Aggression Every Day (PRAISE), Friend to Friend (F2F) and the Bullying Classroom Check-up (BCCU). PRAISE and F2F are aimed at reducing aggression and bullying for elementary school youth attending under-resourced schools. She led the adaptation of F2F and PRAISE to be used with a coaching model, where schools implement the program with training and guidance from CHOP researchers. This model improves both the uptake and sustainability of programming. BCCU is a program that addresses bullying using an innovative, transportable training simulator combined with an evidence-based teacher-coaching model to increase teachers’ prevention, detection, and responses to bullying and promote positive peer relationships in their classrooms. Click here for more details on the programs.
Dr. Waasdorp did her post-doctoral training in prevention science at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Department of Mental Health. She received her PhD in Human Development and Family Studies from the University of Delaware, an MSEd in Psychological Services from the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in Psychology from Muhlenberg College.