Nicole McKenna

Nicole McKenna is the Postdoctoral Associate in Research with Juvenile Justice Populations at Rutgers School of Social Work and will collaborate with Drs. Jacquelynn Duron, Abigail Williams-Butler, and Paul Boxer. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cincinnati in the School of Criminal Justice. Her research focuses on girls in the juvenile legal system, experiences of trauma and victimization, and trauma-informed interventions. She adopts a social justice lens, as well as a feminist and trauma-informed perspective in her research. To date, she has published eight peer-reviewed articles and two book chapters. Her work has been featured in the American Journal of Community Psychology, Criminal Justice and Behavior, and Feminist Criminology. Her dissertation research, Detention as Trauma, is a mixed methods study of trauma-responsive and trauma-inducing practices in U.S. youth detention facilities. She has obtained nearly $10,000 in grant funding to support her research on trauma-informed care. Nicole received the 2021 Student Paper Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Section for her work, Just leave girls alone: Threshold effects of dispositions and recidivism among court-involved girls.