David Finkelhor is Director of Crimes against Children Research Center, Co-Director of the Family Research Laboratory, Professor of Sociology, and University Professor, at the University of New Hampshire. His core fields of interest have been the problems of child victimization, child maltreatment and family violence, which he started to study back in 1977. He is perhaps best known for his conceptual and empirical work on the problem of child sexual abuse, reflected in publications such as Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse (Sage, 1986) and Nursery Crimes (Sage, 1988). He has done extensive research about child homicide, missing and abducted children, children exposed to domestic and peer abuse. In his recent work, for example, his book, Child Victimization (Oxford University Press, 2008), he has tried to unify and integrate knowledge about all the diverse forms of child victimization in a field he has termed Developmental Victimology. This book received the Daniel Schneider Child Welfare Book of the Year award in 2009. All together he is editor and author of 12 books and over 200 journal articles and book chapters. He has received grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, and the US Department of Justice, and a variety of other sources. In 1994, he was given the Distinguished Child Abuse Professional Award by the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, in 2004 he was given the Significant Achievement Award from the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, in 2005 he and his colleagues received the Child Maltreatment Article of the Year award, in 2007 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology, and in 2014 he was awarded the National Scientific Impact Award from the Kempe Center for the prevention and treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect.
Ann L. Coker, Ph.D., M.P.H. is Acting Director of the University of Kentucky’s (UK) Center for Research on Violence Against Women and Professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, in the UK Colleges of Medicine and Public Health. Dr. Coker is a Women’s Health Epidemiologist has worked for more than 30 years on finding and evaluating strategies to prevent violence against women and girls or to reduce the mental and physical health impact of these forms of interpersonal violence. Much of Dr. Coker’s recent research has focused on the effectiveness of bystander-based interventions to reduce sexual violence, dating violence, intimate partner violence against pregnant people, substance use and child sex trafficking. Dr Coker has more than 150 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters addressing violence intervention or preventions. Since 1988, her research has consistently been externally funded through grants from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Justice, and and the Office of Women’s Health, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health, HHS. For the past several years at the University of Kentucky, Dr Coker has served as Research Director, with Dr. Thomas E. Curry as PI, on the NIH funded Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health. The goal of this long standing training grant is to grow the next generation of women’s health researchers; several BIRCWH scholars have focused their research on violence against women and girls and its prevention. Helping early career faculty receive funding to support the research needed to prevent violence is a passion for Dr. Coker.
