Sheena Gardner
Dr. Sheena Gardner received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Mississippi State University in 2014. She began her career at the SSRC as a graduate research assistant in the Wolfgang Frese Survey Research Laboratory. In 2008, she began working as a research associate and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Gardner has worked on projects within the areas of DUI research, juvenile justice, and public safety with her role generally involving data collection, data management, and manuscript development. She has worked with numerous state agencies including the Mississippi Department of Public Safety; the Mississippi Department of Mental Health; the Mississippi Department of Human Services; the Mississippi Department of Health; and the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office. In addition to working with state agencies, she has also worked with the University of Massachusetts Medical School as a consultant on the National Youth Screening & Assessment Project (NYSAP). Gardner has extensive experience working with administrative databases such as first-time DUI offenders through the Mississippi Alcohol Safety Education Program (MASEP); Mississippi traffic citation records; mental health admission/discharge data from the MS Department of Mental Health; and juvenile justice data through the Mississippi Youth Court Information Delivery System (MYCIDS).
Currently, Gardner works primarily on the NIDA funded Juvenile Justice Translational Research on Interventions for Adolescents in the Legal System (JJ-TRIALS). JJ-TRIALS is a cooperative research initiative that seeks to improve the delivery of evidence-based substance abuse treatment services to youth within the juvenile justice system. As part of the implementation team, Gardner is responsible for conducting needs assessments, generating site feedback reports, providing training on data-driven decision making, and serving as a facilitator in participating courts.
Areas of expertise: Delinquency and juvenile justice, disproportionate minority contact, applied sociology