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Biography

Emily Douglas is a full professor in the Department of Social Work & Child Advocacy. Her research focuses on the program and policy implications of issues that address child and family well-being, largely in the areas of family violence: fatal child maltreatment, under-represented victims of partner violence and help-seeking, children’s exposure to partner violence, corporal punishment, family disruption, and the connection between research and policy. Dr. Douglas is the author of 65+ peer-reviewed publications, 5 books, and she presents annually at domestic and international conferences. Dr. Douglas has spoken at the State Houses in Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut and provided invited testimony before a Congressional committee that focused on children’s deaths. Since 2025, she has served with Drs. Svetlana Shpiegel and Wendy Zeitlin (also at Montclair), as the evaluators for the Staffing and Oversight Review Subcommittee of the New Jersey Task Force on Child Abuse and Neglect, which is a self-monitoring system for the Department of Children and Families' Division of Child Protection & Permanence. (Read the most recent report here.) In 2016-2017 she was a Congressional fellow in Washington, D.C., dually sponsored by the Society for Research in Child Development and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Technology; during this time, she held a position in the U.S. Senate where she was the lead author on an investigation concerning for-profit foster care. Dr. Douglas will serve as a senior research fellow with UNICEF's research division, Innocenti, in Florence, Italy. Before coming to Montclair, Dr. Douglas held tenure and leadership roles at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Bridgewater State University, both in Massachusetts.