Our Team

Leadership

Colette (Coco) Auerswald, MD, MS (Co-Director)

Colette (Coco) Auerswald, MD, MS is a pediatrician specialized in adolescent medicine. She is a Professor in the Division of Community Health Sciences at Berkeley Public Health. Dr. Auerswald employs community collaborative, youth-partnered, and mixed methods approaches to studying the social determinants of health and structural interventions to improve health and wellbeing for marginalized youth. She is committed to contributing to the improving the inclusion and wellbeing youth experiencing homelessness, LGBTQ youth, and low-income youth of color and immigrant youth through her work. She is one of the co-founders of i4Y (Innovations for Youth) and the faculty mentor for Youth and Allies Against Homelessness (or YAAH).

Emily Ozer, PhD (Co-Director)

Professor Ozer’s research as a clinical/community psychologist in public health focuses on promoting the healthy development and empowerment of adolescents, bridging participatory research approaches and prevention science in school-based interventions. Her research interests include school-based health promotion and prevention programs, post-traumatic stress disorder, and community-based participatory research. She is proud to work in partnership with San Francisco Peer Resources and the San Francisco Unified School District to help address educational and health inequities, and to work on strengthening Berkeley as an institution for supporting community-engaged scholarship. She is one of the co-founders of i4Y (Innovations for Youth) and serves as the current Director of the Institute of Human Development.

Valerie B. Shapiro, PhD (Co-Director)

Dr. Shapiro, is an associate professor in Social Welfare. Dr. Shapiro's researches the prevention of mental, emotional, and behavioral problems in children and youth through the adoption, implementation, and sustainability of effective prevention practices. To promote the use of effective prevention practice, her scholarship focuses on how to (1) set the stage for communities to adopt and sustain a science-based approach to prevention, (2) implement programs successfully, and (3) assess youth outcomes in routine practice. She is the faculty lead for the SHIFT Research Group.

Marieka Schotland, PhD (Executive Director)

Dr. Schotland is a community psychologist. She has a wide range of substantive expertise in positive school climate and connection, restorative justice, youth program evaluation and health promotion among diverse adolescents. She brings her outstanding management skills to the position of Executive Director where she is responsible for managing the Center’s affiliates, the center's undergraduate training program (YEDI), collaborating with community and academic partners, contributing to strategic planning and decision-making, facilitating, and managing all planning, outreach, communications and events.

Faculty Advisors

We have assembled faculty advisors who guide I4Y’s development and direction. These advisors represent an inclusive multi-disciplinary approach to understanding adolescent well-being.

Julianna Deardorff, PhD

Dr. Deardorff is the head of the Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health (MCAH) program, focused on early life adversity, pubertal development, and the health and well-being of adolescents, with a specific focus on Latino youth and young adults. Her research centers pubertal development, sexual and reproductive health during adolescence and young adulthood, mental health, and risk and protective factors.

Deborah L. McKoy, PhD

Dr. McKoy is Executive Director and Founder of the UCB Center for Cities and Schools at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development and a lecturer in City and Regional Planning and the Graduate School of Education. Her research and teaching focus on intersections of educational reform, urban & metropolitan planning, community development, and public policy. Central is the critical role of young people in urban and metropolitan transformation.

Dr. Erin Murphy-Graham

Erin Murphy-Graham, PhD

Dr. Murphy-Graham works in comparative and international education, teaching international development and qualitative research methods.Her research focuses on: the process by which education fosters the empowerment of girls and women, and conceptualization of empowerment; the role of education in changing how students relate, particularly in intimate relationships and trust building; 3) the evaluation of educational empowerment programs for youth and adults in Latin America.