Catherine Taylor PhD, MSW, MPH

Catherine Taylor, Ph.D., LCSW, MPH, is a Professor with dual experience and training in social work and public health, with a foundation in biological sciences. She completed her MSW/MPH at Boston University and then trained at UCLA School of Public Health in community health sciences, epidemiology, and media studies. She went on to be a post-doctoral scholar at Columbia University School of Social Work, focused on the development and assessment of preventive interventions to prevent child abuse. She then joined Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine in New Orleans (2005-2020) as faculty, where she became the Founding Director of their Violence Prevention Institute and Pincus Violence Prevention Scholarship program and developed their first course on “violence as a public health problem.”

Her research is focused on the primary prevention of trauma and violence, especially that which impacts children, via testing and implementing preventive interventions and understanding the important and complex role of social norms in this arena. She is also focused on optimizing access to and translation of scientific evidence, as well as the uptake and implementation of evidence-based practice to promote mental health, treat trauma, and prevent violence.

Dr. Taylor is co-leading a mixed methods study that has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The quantitative aim includes a randomized controlled trial (RCT) (n=821) with short and long-term (~4 years) follow-ups designed to assess the efficacy of two brief, relatively low-resource preventive intervention parenting programs with potential for wide dissemination. The qualitative aim is to assess key social-ecological contexts that impact parenting via in-depth interviews with primary caregivers and partners as well as focus groups with pediatric care providers. Extensive data have been collected to assess individual, dyadic, and social-ecological constructs relevant to parenting, including three forms of quantitative data: 1) dyadic (mother-child) observational data, which assessed the quality and synchrony of the relationship such as parent sensitivity, child involvement, and dyadic reciprocity using the Coding Interactive Behavior (CIB) rating system; 2) dyadic (mother-child) Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) readings representative of autonomic nervous system emotional and behavioral self-regulation; and 3) parent self-report via telephone or face-to-face interviews of constructs such as parenting discipline behaviors and attitudes, stress, and mental health; exposure to intimate partner and/or neighborhood violence in adulthood, and adverse experiences in childhood (ACEs); perceived social norms relevant to parenting; and COVID-related experiences.

Dr. Taylor welcomes interest from prospective and current students and postdoctoral scholars in a variety of fields (e.g., social work, public health, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, or other related fields in social behavioral and mental health sciences), who are interested in working with data from this project either directly in her lab or collaborating with her team.