Grand Rounds, featuring Dr. Kate Guastaferro

Kate Guastaferro, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Global Public Health and holds a secondary appointment in the Silver School of Social Work at New York University. An intervention scientist by training, Dr. Guastaferro’s work is devoted to the development and optimization of interventions with high public health impact, such that the intervention reaches and improves the lives of those for which it was designed. She is an expert in the multiphase optimization strategy and her expertise is in parent-focused, multicomponent behavioral interventions to prevent child maltreatment. Dr. Guastaferro has led two a statewide prevention trials in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania focusing on on the coordinated implementation of evidence-base child sexual abuse prevention programs; including the parent-focused child sexual abuse program that she developed, piloted and evaluated.

Dr. Guastaferro received her PhD and MPH from Georgia State University’s School of Public Health. In 2016 she received the PhD Public Health Achievement Award from Georgia State in recognition of her academic and practical successes. She holds a BA in anthropology from Boston University where in 2008 she was inducted into the Scarlet Key Honor Society in recognition to her devotion to the promotion and coordination of an all-University consciousness through student activities. She completed a NIH-funded T32 postdoctoral fellowship in the Prevention and Methodology Training program at the Pennsylvania State University.

Prior to joining NYU, Dr. Guastaferro was an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. In 2020, she was awarded the Victoria S. Levin Award for Early Career Success in Young Children’s Mental Health Research from the Society for Research in Child Development. Her work is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as well as the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals including Prevention Science, Child Maltreatment, Translational Behavioral Medicine, and the American Journal of Public Health.