Meet the Team

After completing her PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Georgia, Dr. Bright spent eight years on the faculty at the University of Florida in both the College of Medicine and College of Education where she developed a multidisciplinary research agenda around family violence and social determinants of health.

As her research program advanced, she found the most important part of her work to be partnerships with community-based, direct service providers. More and more, she became disenchanted with the distance between her academic position and the community organizations she cared about. In 2021, Dr. Bright left academia to found the Center for Violence Prevention Research. Her goal was to create a research organization that was accessible to non-researchers and that conducted research with immediate implications for practice.

Dr. Bright’s work has been funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Science Foundation, the American Psychosomatic Society, AcademyHealth, and several not-for-profit organizations. She has published dozens of papers in high impact scientific journals including JAMA Pediatrics and the Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Dr. Bright is a member of the National Coalition for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, the Florida Maternal Mortality Review Committee, Florida’s 8th Judicial Circuit Child Fatality Review Committee, and on the board of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence (NRCDV).