Michelle W. Woodbridge

Michelle W. Woodbridge, PhD, has more than 25 years of experience in providing research, evaluation, and technical assistance in children’s mental health services, school-based systems of support, trauma-informed care, health and social services, and other community-based services. She is executive director of the Center for Learning & Development, comprising more than 55 researchers and revenue of nearly $20 million annually. Her expertise includes working with education leaders and practitioners to identify desired outcomes, develop strategies to achieve them, and design methods to collect and use high-quality data to improve program, youth, and family outcomes.

Woodbridge directs large-scale national, statewide, and local projects on practices and policies in preschool through secondary school learning environments. She is co-principal investigator of multiple federally funded randomized controlled trials of schoolwide positive behavior support programs, interventions for students with or at risk for disabilities, and trauma-informed services in school districts across the country. She also codirected the National Behavior Research Coordination Center, which supported university partners in conducting randomized controlled trials to build the evidence base for interventions to improve outcomes for young students with emotional and behavioral disorders.

Woodbridge has extensive experience in technical assistance and professional capacity-building. She contributes to multiple training, coaching, and technical support activities for the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Appalachia, which partners with education stakeholders to use research and evidence to inform policies and practices that benefit students in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. She also was co-principal investigator on the evaluation and technical assistance team of the California Mental Health Services Authority’s Prevention and Early Intervention Initiatives to improve student mental health programs in public K–12 and higher education, and she directed the provision of technical assistance for the Statewide Evaluation of First 5 California for all 58 California counties.

Before joining SRI, Woodbridge was a senior policy researcher at Georgetown University’s Child Development Center where she facilitated the capacity-building of states and communities in their evaluation of children’s mental health services as part of the National Technical Assistance Center for Children’s Mental Health.

Woodbridge is the author or coauthor of numerous blogs, articles, book chapters, reports, practice guides, and presentations on numerous topics: efficacy of student behavioral interventions, implementation and evaluation of systems of care for children with emotional and behavioral disorders and their families, participatory research practices and implementation science, inclusion of children with disabilities, and the use of evaluation data for program improvement and policy development.

Woodbridge received her PhD in education with an emphasis in development and disabilities from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Key projects

• Regional Educational Laboratory Appalachia
• Systematic Replication of BEST in CLASS
• Efficacy Study of Discipline in the Secondary Classroom
• Efficacy Study of Foundations, School-wide Positive Discipline for Middle Schools
• Effectiveness Study of Tools for Getting Along: Teaching Students to Problem Solve
• Students Exposed to Trauma: A Study of the CBITS Program
• National Effectiveness Study of First Step to Success