About the Mark Chaffin Center for Healthy Development
The Mark Chaffin Center for Healthy Development is a university-level research center at Georgia State University committed to promoting the health, safety and well-being of children, adults and families through research, service, education, training and advocacy. The center emphasizes bringing scientific innovation into the everyday lives of people and their communities through translational and implementation research.
Kathleen Baggett
Director
Dr. Kathleen Baggett, Director of the Mark Chaffin Center for Healthy Development, is an associate professor in the Division of Health Promotion and Behavior in the School of Public Health at Georgia State University. Within the Mark Chaffin Center, she directs research on promoting nurturing care practices of parents and other caregivers that foster infant and toddler social-emotional health and development.
She obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Developmental and Child Psychology from the University of Kansas. She then completed a clinical postdoctoral internship in child and family psychology, followed by a U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Kansas. Baggett continued on at KU’s Juniper Gardens Children’s Project, where she was promoted to research professor and senior scientist before joining Georgia State University in 2016.
Read more about Baggett
Mission
Promoting the health, safety, well-being, and contributions of children, adults, and families through research, service, education, training, and advocacy.
The Mark Chaffin Center for Healthy Development is home to:
- The Center for Leadership in Disability, translating research into sustainable community practices that contribute to independent, self-determined, inclusive and productive lives for people with disabilities and their families;
- Georgia Association for Infant Mental Health: Birth to Five, building culturally responsive preventive and therapeutic professional capacities to promote family, infant, and early childhood mental health development
- National Center on Child Trafficking, a collaboration of professionals with expertise in child trauma and human trafficking.
- The National SafeCare Training and Research Center, implementing nationwide the SafeCare model, an evidence-based home visitation family support program that has been shown to reduce child maltreatment among families with a history for maltreatment or with risk factors for maltreatment; and
- Prevent Child Abuse Georgia, focused on changing the way our nation thinks about prevention, focusing on community activities and public policies that prioritize prevention right from the start to make sure child abuse and neglect never occur.
