Cathy Spatz Widom

Cathy Spatz Widom, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor in the Psychology Department at John Jay College and a member of the Graduate Center faculty, City University of New York. Widom is an elected fellow of the American Psychological Association (Divisions 41,43, and 37), American Psychopathological Association, and American Society of Criminology (ASC). Widom has served on the editorial boards of psychology, criminology, and child maltreatment journals. She served on the National Research Council committee that produced the 1993 report on child abuse and neglect and served on the more recent Institute of Medicine Committee on Child Maltreatment Research, Policy, and Practice for the Next Decade that wrote the 2013 report and was a member of the Committee on Law and Justice at the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences at the National Research Council. The National Institute of Justice, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation have funded her research.  She has received numerous awards for her research on the cycle of violence, including the Edwin H. Sutherland Award in 2013 from the ASC and Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2016. Widom and her colleagues have published over 130 scholarly papers and book chapters on the long-term consequences of childhood abuse (physical and sexual) and neglect, including two articles in Science (1989 and 2015) on the cycle of violence and intergenerational transmission of child abuse and neglect. Widom and a co-PI host a summer training institute for research on child abuse and neglect to increase the pipeline of researchers in the area of child maltreatment. Dr. Widom received her Ph.D. in psychology from Brandeis University.