Dr. Diane Terry
Dr. Diane Terry, Commissioner, Board of Supervisors At-Large
Dr. Diane Terry is a Senior Research Associate at the Psychology Applied Research Center at Loyola Marymount University. She has over 15 years of experience in the field of social welfare and program evaluation research. Her research focuses on mental health disparities among communities of color, permanency and well-being outcomes for families involved with the child welfare system, and criminal desistance among formerly incarcerated young adults. Her book (co-authored with Laura Abrams), Everyday Desistance: The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth (Rutgers University Press, 2017), examines how formerly incarcerated young men and women navigate reentry and the transition to adulthood in the context of Los Angeles.
Using a community-based participatory research lens, Dr. Terry has helped to lead and support statewide and local research and evaluation focused on mental health disparities among communities of color; organizational capacity-building among community-based organizations; well-being outcomes for kinship families; collective impact approaches for improving access to care, and positive youth development for systems-involved youth. Through these efforts, she has honed her expertise in multi-year and multi-site evaluation studies, evaluation implementation, mixed-methods data collection, and project management. Dr. Terry is passionate about using research and evaluation to help strengthen, inform, and advance policies and programs for unserved and underserved communities.