BS, Cornell University, Child Development and Family Relationships
MS and PhD, Brandeis University, Psychology
CATHY SPATZ WIDOM is a Distinguished Professor in the Psychology Department at John Jay College and a member of the Graduate Center faculty, City University of New York. She is a fellow of the three divisions of American Psychological Association (Division 41 - Psychology and Law, Division 43 – Society for Family Psychology, and Division 37 – Child and Family Policy and Practice), the American Psychopathological Association, and the American Society of Criminology. A former faculty member at Harvard, Indiana, University at Albany (SUNY), and New Jersey Medical School, Widom was co-editor of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology from 2010-2013 and has served on the editorial boards of psychology, criminology, and child maltreatment journals. She is a frequent consultant on national review panels and has been invited to testify before congressional and state committees. She has published extensively on the long-term consequences of child abuse and neglect, including numerous papers on the cycle of violence. Widom serves on the Committee on Law and Justice at the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences at the National Research Council (NRC) and was a member of the Institute of Medicine Study panel, Committee on Child Maltreatment Research, Policy, and Practice for the Next Decade (2012-2013). Professor Widom has received numerous awards for her research, including the 1989 American Association for the Advancement of Science Behavioral Science Research Prize for her paper on the "cycle of violence” and the 2016 Stockholm Prize in Criminology. Since 1986, Widom has been engaged in a large study to determine the long term consequences of early childhood abuse (physical and sexual) and neglect and has recently published her second paper in Science (2015) on the intergenerational transmission of child abuse and neglect.