Janis B. Kupersmidt, Ph.D.

Dr. Janis Kupersmidt, President and Senior Research Scientist at iRT, is a licensed clinical psychologist and a former tenured professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published more than 70 peer-reviewed chapters and scientific articles on topics related to mentoring, prevention science, the social and emotional development of children and adolescents, peer relations, delinquency, academic achievement, and aggression.

She is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) on a grant to develop and evaluate the efficacy of a web-based mentor training program. She is also the PI on the Mentee Risk Status and Mentor Training project. The project focuses on factors that affect mentoring outcomes for three populations of youth, namely, children in foster care, children of prisoners, and court-involved youth. The project is designed to develop a youth relationship risk tool that can be used by mentoring programs and create research-based, best practice recommendations about the most effective methods of mentor training and support, particularly for those serving at-risk populations.  She is also the Co-PI on a grant to create evidence-based web and mobile pre-match training for mentees and their caregivers.

Dr. Kupersmidt is a co-author of the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring (EEPM). The EEPM includes the only set of research-based standards and benchmarks for implementing effective youth mentoring programs in the field of mentoring.  Dr. Kupersmidt received her doctorate in Psychology from Duke University.