Jay Mancini named Oak Ridge Associated Universities research institute featured researcher
Jay A. Mancini, professor of human development in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences and the senior research fellow at the Institute for Society, Culture and Environment at Virginia Tech, is the January 2009 Institute for Advanced Biometrics and Social Systems Studies Featured Researcher.
Mancini has been working with the Institute for Advanced Biometrics and Social Systems Studies (IABS3) as a principal investigator on the Providing Access to Resilience-Enhancing Technologies for Disadvantaged Communities and Vulnerable Populations (PARET) Project. His role was to consult on community social organization and community capacity building. His research focuses on community and family support systems, health and well-being, and prevention of intimate partner violence. Mancini will present the PARET Project research findings at the 2009 World Conference on Disaster Management in Toronto in June.
Mancini’s current research focuses on sustaining community-based programs for at-risk families, the effects of deployment on youth in military families, and on social exclusion and homelessness among veterans. He also recently consulted with social service professionals in New Orleans and Mississippi on sustaining family support programs in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He conducts cross-national research with colleagues in the United Kingdom.
He is a Fellow of the National Council on Family Relations and a Fellow of the World Demographic Association. He received the 2007 Distinguished Alumni Service Award from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the 2008 Distinguished Alumni Research Award from the College of Human Ecology at Kansas State University. He is the editor (with Karen A. Roberto) of Human Development Across the Lifespan: Antecedents, Processes, and Consequences of Change (Lexington Books).
IABS3 was established in 2008 under the umbrella of Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) and is a think-tank and research center designed to address security concerns related to terrorist threats and natural disasters. The Institute is a partnership between ORAU and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) that leverages research expertise from the seven ORNL partner universities – Georgia Tech, Duke, University of Virginia, Vanderbilt, North Carolina State, Virginia Tech, and Florida State, as well as from the science and technology capabilities of ORAU’s 119 member institutions and ORAU’s network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Educational Institutions.
