MARK CHAFFIN CENTER FOR HEALTHY DEVELOPMENT
The Mark Chaffin Center for Healthy Development is focused on preventing and addressing child maltreatment, building social-emotional competencies and promoting meaningful inclusion and quality of life for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
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Kathleen Baggett, interim 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. Her research is focused on developing and evaluating innovative interventions for improving caregiver practices that promote pivotal competencies of very young children to optimize life course trajectories. Most notably, she has developed remote coaching interventions that have successfully engaged highly vulnerable families, early intervention teachers and home visitors.
The center works to foster social ecologies that promote healthy development and well-being through positive developmental and behavioral supports at home and across multiple community-based systems of care. Researchers at the Mark Chaffin Center develop and study real-world implementation of evidence-based practices that optimize public health by:
- Promoting safety and social-emotional competency development, beginning in infancy through the transition to adulthood and parenting
- Building the capacity and practices of parents, caregivers, family members, educators and diverse discipline providers to promote health, safety and social-emotional competencies
- Reducing disparities by improving access to evidence-based practices
- Improving access to and facility with systems of care data
- Enhancing systemic workforce capacities to promote health, development, social-emotional well-being, meaningful inclusion and quality of life
- Capitalizing on early life development and learning to optimize lifelong health outcomes
The Mark Chaffin Center for Healthy Development is home to the Center for Leadership in Disability, the National SafeCare® Training and Research Center, Prevent Child Abuse Georgia, the National Center on Child Trafficking, and the National Center for Sexual Violence Prevention.