Susan Sheridan, Ph.D.

Founding Director, Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools
George Holmes University Professor of Educational Psychology

Dr. Susan Sheridan is the founding director of the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools, known as CYFS, and the George Holmes University Professor of Educational Psychology. Sheridan joined the faculty at the UNL Department of Educational Psychology in 1998, after several years at the University of Utah.

Sheridan founded CYFS in 2004 — a UNL Program of Excellence that conducts, supports and shares high-quality research in the social, behavioral and educational sciences. For the past 20 years, Sheridan has led the center’s growth to more than 100 faculty, staff and students. Today, CYFS is a leading cross-campus interdisciplinary research center represented by significant productivity and impact. Since its inception, CYFS has housed more than 300 funded research grants, totaling more than $133 million.

During her career, Sheridan has received more than $73 million in grant funding and has authored more than 230 books, chapters and articles, including several award-winning papers. Much of her work aims to understand effective relationships and partnerships for children and youth. She is particularly interested in strengthening relationships between parents and teachers and identifying meaningful ways to establish home–school partnerships.

Sheridan’s primary grant work and research focus is a model of service delivery known as Teachers and Parents as Partners (also known as conjoint behavioral consultation), focused on bringing parents, teachers, and other care providers together to develop positive relationships and address concerns they share for children. Her work has also examined early childhood education and development, children’s social-emotional skills, rural education, and parental engagement.

Sheridan is the first UNL faculty member to be elected to the National Academy of Education, an organization of more than 300 U.S. and international researchers who seek to improve education policy and practice through research. She is also past editor of School Psychology Review, the research journal of the National Association of School Psychologists, and past president of the Society of the Study of School Psychology. She holds a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.