Deborah Gorman-Smith
Dean of the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, Emily Klein Gidwitz Professor, Chief Strategist for Community Engagement and Partnerships
969 East 60th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637
Phone: 773.834.1781
debgs@uchicago.edu
Executive Assistant:
Heidi Nagel
773.702.1430
hnagel@uchicago.edu
Deborah Gorman-Smith, PhD, is chief strategist for community engagement and partnerships for the University of Chicago and the Emily Klein Gidwitz Professor and dean of the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. For more than 20 years, she served as faculty director of the Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention, a Center devoted to studying and stemming the underlying causes of youth violence through evidence-based, collaborative interventions that focus on families and communities, linking them with schools, the justice system, social service agencies, and policymakers.
Throughout her career, Professor Gorman-Smith has focused on building scientific knowledge to understand the etiology, developmental impact, and prevention of youth violence. Conducting both longitudinal developmental studies and large-scale randomized controlled trials to evaluate the effect of family-based, school-based, and community-level preventive interventions. Gorman-Smith’s research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Justice, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and several foundations.
Before coming to the University of Chicago, Gorman-Smith was a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Gorman-Smith is a past president of the Society for Prevention Research and has served on other state, national, and international committees, including the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She is an elected fellow of the Society for Prevention Research, the American Society of Criminology, and the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.
Gorman-Smith received her PhD in clinical-developmental psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago and master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Northern Illinois University.