Megan Golonka

Megan Golonka is a research scientist with the Center for Child and Family Policy (CCFP) in the Sanford School of Public Policy. She is a member of the Child Maltreatment Prevention research team, which focuses on strengthening health and social service systems to improve child well-being. She also is engaged with data collection and management across nine international sites for the Parenting Across Cultures project. Finally, Golonka coordinates and leads efforts at the CCFP to promote equity and inclusion in research. Her research interests include child welfare, adolescent risk behavior, social development, and parental incarceration, approached through a risk and resilience lens within an ecological framework. She cares deeply about addressing challenges facing children and families through research and policy development.

Golonka also prioritizes teaching and mentoring to encourage undergraduate students to explore child and family policy issues through interdisciplinary study and original research on real-world policy issues. She introduces undergraduate students to child policy research through the cornerstone introductory seminar for the Child Policy Research Certificate Program. She also supports students in conducting their own research through independent studies and leads a Bass Connections team of undergraduate researchers.

Golonka originally joined the Center for Child and Family Policy as a senior research aide (2001-2004) after receiving her B.A. in psychology from the University of Notre Dame. She later worked as a project coordinator with the CCFP's Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center (2004-2008). She received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Duke University in 2013, along with a Certificate in College Teaching from the Duke University Graduate School. She spent a year teaching academic writing to first year students in the Duke University Thompson Writing Program before returning to the CCFP and Psychology & Neuroscience Departments as a research scientist in the Center for the Study of Adolescent Risk and Resilience (C-StARR).

Education:

Ph.D. Developmental Psychology, Duke University – 2013
Certificate in College Teaching, Duke University – 2013
M.A. Developmental Psychology, Duke University – 2011
B.A. University of Notre Dame - 2000