C. Joy Stewart (she/her)

C. Joy Stewart, PhD, MSW, Research Associate Professor, has two decades of experience conducting research and evaluation of child welfare and other social services programs. She currently serves as the co-Principal Investigator on Creating Indicators and Improving Outcomes (https://ma-dept-ma.cloudapps.unc.edu/). In that role, she oversees the analysis of state administrative data and also prepares periodic reports on the state’s child welfare program. She also designed and developed the evaluation of the state’s child welfare training. She recently led the evaluation effort of Project NO REST which was a federally funded project to address human trafficking of youth in North Carolina. She was the PI on a project involving the linking of information from the state’s Court Improvement Project with administrative data from the child welfare system. Dr. Stewart was an investigator on Project Broadcast, a federally funded project to improve the well-being of children and families through the development of a trauma-informed child welfare system. She co-designed a tool that screens children involved with the child welfare system for exposure to trauma. She also served as the lead evaluator of the North Carolina Child Welfare Workforce Collaborative, a 5-year project funded by the U.S. Children’s Bureau to prepare graduate students for leadership roles in child welfare and assess child welfare workforce needs. Dr. Stewart’s evaluation focused on the Leadership Scholars initiative which funded field placements for a group of MSW students assigned to county departments of social services.