Anna Yaros

Anna Yaros, PhD, is the Director of the Mental Health, Risk, and Resilience Program at RTI and has more than 12 years of experience in prevention and intervention research among children and adolescents. Dr. Yaros has substantive interest in risk and protective factors for a variety of youth risk behaviors—such as aggression, violence, delinquency, and substance use—measurement issues in youth risk behavior research, and evaluation of school and community-based prevention programming.

She currently serves as a principal investigator of a project funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that aims to evaluate the adverse community experiences and resilience framework for community-level violence prevention. Dr. Yaros is also leading RTI’s efforts on the Examination of Firearm Violence Crises Using Crisis Text Line Data. In this CDC-funded project, RTI researchers are using machine learning to identify mentions of rare events, such as firearm violence or suicide, in Crisis Text Line conversations. In addition, she is working with El Futuro, a Durham, NC-based nonprofit, to increase its capacity to serve the mental health needs of underserved populations through the roll-out of a telehealth model.

Prior to joining RTI in 2014, Dr. Yaros was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clark-Hill Institute for Positive Youth Development, where she coordinated the family intervention portion of the CDC-funded Youth Violence Prevention Center project. She is a licensed clinical psychologist with prior experience providing mental health services to children, adolescents, and adults in a variety of inpatient and outpatient settings.

Dr. Yaros is a member of the American Psychological Association, Society for Prevention Research, and Society for Research on Adolescence. In addition, she has served as a reviewer or board member of several peer-reviewed journals throughout her career, including the Adolescence Research Review, Journal of School Violence, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and Prevention Science.