Lauren Lanehart is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work whose research focuses on resilience among justice-involved and system-impacted youth, pathways into and through system involvement, and the development and evaluation of responsive interventions. She is particularly interested in how youths’ strengths, needs, constraints, lived contexts, and patterns of resilience can inform more accurate assessment and more precise, effective intervention. Her broader interests include youth-serving system responses to risk, resilience, and context. Her work is informed by intersectionality, social determinants of health, and expanded conceptualizations of adversity.
Her methodological interests include mixed methods, youth-engaged research, person-centered and profile analytic approaches, intervention co-design and evaluation, and measurement and assessment development. Her developing program of research seeks to advance theory and intervention science by better understanding heterogeneity among justice-involved and system-impacted youth, including meaningful profiles of strengths, needs, risk, resilience, and context and how those profiles may inform assessment, intervention matching, adaptation, and co-design. Her current work also examines processes and mechanisms of behavior change and contributes to emerging research on the conceptualization and measurement of resilience among system-involved youth. A broader goal of her work is to strengthen coordination across local, state, and national juvenile justice systems so that advances in research, clinical practice, and policy can be more effectively and efficiently shared, translated, and implemented across jurisdictions. Across this work, she aims to produce rigorous, practice-relevant research that more accurately reflects young people’s lived realities and can strengthen interventions, policy, and youth-serving systems.
At UT Austin, Lauren is a Graduate Research Assistant with the Health Behavior Research and Training Institute (HBRT), where she works with Drs. Danielle Parrish, Kirk von Sternberg, and Mary Velasquez on CHOICES health behavior change and intervention research with justice-involved youth. Her work spans intervention research and adaptation, data analysis and manuscript development, grant preparation, and human-subjects research administration, with primary responsibilities on CHOICES-Teen and CHOICES4Boys. Lauren also collaborates with Dr. Mary-Ellen Brown and the Center for Resilient Communities on research and evaluation addressing childhood traumatic stress, resilience, and youth- and family-serving systems, including community-engaged research, intervention and program development, and research-practice partnerships.
Lauren’s scholarship also extends to social work education and instructional innovation. She is particularly interested in strengthening the evidence base for graduate social work education, improving preparation for social work practice with groups and families, and more effectively connecting classroom learning with applied practice. Her educational scholarship is guided by a vision of graduate social work classrooms as both evidence-informed and evidence-generative: grounded in the strongest available science while designed for rigorous evaluation that can contribute new knowledge about how social workers are best prepared for practice. As a Graduate Teaching Assistant for Evidence-Informed Clinical Practice and Evaluation, she contributes to the development, implementation, and evaluation of an innovative graduate clinical course designed to strengthen students’ applied skills in evidence-informed assessment, intervention, evaluation, and clinical decision-making. More broadly, she is interested in developing and rigorously evaluating educational innovations that address gaps in professional preparation and contribute to a stronger evidence base for graduate social work education.
Before beginning her doctoral studies, Lauren earned her Master of Social Work from Texas Christian University, where her research included youth workforce policy and evaluation of the Bystander2Upstander sexual-violence prevention program. Her practice experience includes clinical assessment, individual intervention, crisis response, and program evaluation with youth involved in juvenile justice and school systems. She is a Licensed Master Social Worker and Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI)® Practitioner.
Lauren entered social work following a nearly 15-year career in the United States Air Force, retiring at the rank of Master Sergeant. Her military career spanned intelligence and language analysis, diplomatic and cross-cultural operations, leadership, resilience programming, suicide intervention and prevention, and organizational initiatives addressing sexual violence, discrimination, and inclusion. These experiences continue to inform her commitment to research and education that are responsive to the people, communities, and systems they are intended to serve.