Director

Gene Brody, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Research Professor of Child and Family Development at the University of Georgia and Director of the Center for Family Research. This is his twenty-eighth year at UGA after completing his graduate education at the University of Arizona. During the first half of his career, his research focused on the contributions of parental psychological functioning, parenting practices and sibling relationships to the emotional and behavioral well-being of children and adolescents. These studies laid a foundation for the research that Dr. Brody has conducted during the second half of his career. This work has followed rural African-American families over time in an attempt to identify family and community processes that forecast academic, emotional and behavioral competence in children and adolescents living in conditions of environmental stress. The results of this research have informed the development of a prevention program, The Strong African-American Families (SAAF) Program, for rural families with early adolescent children. The effectiveness of this program in preventing alcohol and substance use and early onset sexual behavior is now being tested in a randomized prevention trial. He can be reached at gbrody@uga.edu.