Former Scientists

David DeGarmo, PhD

Dave DeGarmo is a senior scientist at the Oregon Social Learning Center. He received his doctorate in sociology at the University of Akron in 1993 and was a postdoctoral fellow of the NIMH Family Research Consortium on Family Risk and Resilience. Dave is principal investigator of a county representative study of divorced father families funded by the NICHD and is an investigator for the Center for Drug Abuse Prevention in the Child Welfare System.

His interests are understanding individual and contextual factors promoting effective fathering and understanding the independent impact of fathering on child adjustment. He is currently co-investigator on studies funded by NIDA and the Veteran’s Administration to better understand effective intervention to promote family adjustment for deployed and post-deployed military families.

Dave is developing intervention approaches for improving divorced fathers’ parenting and for engaging and promoting quality father involvement. He has methodological expertise and interests in the longitudinal evaluation of preventive interventions, the understanding of mediating mechanisms for intervention effectiveness, and factors associated with variance in effective implementation.

He currently serves on the editorial board of Parenting: Science and Practice and is a current member of the Institute of Educational Sciences Social and Behavioral Review Panel and former member of the Population Studies Committee of the NICHD.

J. Mark Eddy, PhD

Dr. J. Mark Eddy is a former Senior Scientist and Licensed Psychologist at OSLC Developments, Inc. (ODI). At ODI, he was the principal investigator on The Child Study, a multisite randomized controlled trial of the Friends of the Children youth mentoring program.

For the past 25 years, he has worked as a researcher on several longitudinal randomized controlled trials of interventions for children and families, with a particular focus on the prevention of childhood conduct problems and related problems, including academic failure, alcohol and drug use, and early sexual behavior.

His other current and recent studies include the Family R and R Study, a randomized controlled trial of the multimodal Relief Nursery program for families at risk for child welfare system involvement; the Parent Child Study, a randomized trial of parent management training with incarcerated parents within adult corrections; the Paths Study of the transition into young adulthood for youth who were heavily involved with the juvenile justice system and who participated in a randomized trial of Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC, now known as Treatment Foster Care Oregon); and the Linking the Interests of Families and Teachers Study of the transitions into young adulthood for participants in a randomized multi-modal school-based prevention intervention program that began during elementary school. He has served as co-investigator with Dr. Charles R. Martinez, Jr. on a variety of projects through the Oregon Social Learning Center Latino Research Team, including the Latino Youth and Family Empowerment Project, which developed and studied a culturally specific parent training intervention for Latino families with youngsters at risk for substance use and related problems; and the Adolescent Latino Acculturation Study, which was designed to learn more about how Latino families and their middle school youth who have immigrated to the U.S. adapt to life in this country.

Dr. Eddy also serves as a Senior Scientist at the Oregon Social Learning Center, and the Director of Research at Partners for Our Children within the School of Social Work at the University of Washington.

Dr. Philip Fisher, PhD

Dr. Philip Fisher is a Professor of Psychology (clinical) at the University of Oregon and a Senior Scientist at the Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC). He is also Science Director for the National Forum on Early Childhood Policy and Programs, based at Harvard University.

Dr. Fisher’s work on children in foster care and the child welfare system includes (a) basic research characterizing the effects of early stress on neurobiological systems such as the HPA axis and areas of the prefrontal cortex involved in executive functioning; (b) the development of preventive interventions, including the Treatment Foster Care Oregon Program for Preschoolers (TFCO-P, formerly MTFC-P) and the Kids in Transition to School Program (KITS); and (c) the dissemination of evidence-based practice in community settings. His work has been funded by a number of institutes of the National Institutes of Health, including NIDA, NIMH, and NICDH, as well as the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.

He serves on a number of national advisory groups related to prevention science and community based research. His intervention programs are being implemented at sites throughout the United States and Europe.

John Landsverk, Ph.D.

John Landsverk has a doctorate in sociology and is the founding director of the Child and Adolescent Services Research Center (CASRC) at Children’s Hospital in San Diego. In addition to his primary appointment as Senior Research Scientist at OSLC, he is a Senior Scholar at the Brown School of Social Work, Washington University in St. Louis, and Senior Research Professor at the School of Social Work, University of Southern California. Dr. Landsverk has received numerous project and center grants from the NIMH and other federal agencies to conduct research primarily on mental health care for children and adolescents involved with child welfare.

These include his last NIMH funded advanced center with collaborators from the OSLC (Implementation Research Methods Group) focusing on the development of innovative research methods to conduct implementation research related to public child welfare and child mental health service systems, as well as an earlier NIMH funded Child and Adolescent Interdisciplinary Research Network (network of 25 researchers and service system managers from the disciplines of clinical and developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, social work, health care economics, and pediatrics with a principal focus to improve mental health services for children involved with child welfare systems through the implementation of evidence-based interventions). Dr. Landsverk has published widely on findings from the national child welfare study, National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW), with support from his center funding and an NIMH funded R01 study, Caring for Children in Child Welfare. Recent publications include multiple chapters in two books based on NSCAW, Child Protection: Using Research to Improve Policy and Practice, published by Brookings, and Child Welfare and Child Well-Being: New Perspectives from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being, published by Oxford University Press, on which he was a co-editor. In addition, he is a co-author for Beyond Common Sense: Children Welfare, Child Well-Being, and the Evidence for Policy Reform, published in 2005. For nine years, Dr. Landsverk chaired the Braam Oversight Panel that provided technical assistance and monitoring oversight for a mediated settlement to a class action suit involving the child welfare and mental health systems in the State of Washington.