Director
David C. Schwebel, Ph.D., directs the UAB Youth Safety Lab. Dr. Schwebel is University Professor of Psychology and Associate Vice President for Research Facilities and Infrastructure at University of Alabama at Birmingham. He earned his B.A. from Yale University in 1994, his M.A. from University of Iowa in 1996, and his Ph.D. from University of Iowa in 2000. He completed a clinical psychology internship at University of Washington School of Medicine.
Dr. Schwebel has published over 350 peer-reviewed manuscripts, almost all focusing on understanding and preventing unintentional injury in children. He is known for developing and evaluating innovative, technologically-based child injury prevention programs. He has lectured widely about his research and consults regularly with industry, law, government and university groups. Dr. Schwebel is a Woodrow Wilson Scholar, a Fulbright Award winner, and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He has served as Principal Investigator on grants worth over $12 million and his research has been funded by the NIH, CDC, DOT, and other federal, non-profit and industry sources.
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Lab Manager
Anna Johnston, M.A., serves as Lab Manager and Study Coordinator for the UAB Youth Safety Lab. She received her undergraduate education at Birmingham-Southern College, majoring in Psychology. Anna went on to complete a Master’s of Counseling at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and recently earned a Global Health Certificate from the UAB School of Public Health. Before joining the Youth Safety Lab, Anna worked as a child, adolescent, and family therapist providing testing, assessment, and direct clinical services to local families. She is passionate about childhood injury prevention, community health, and global health outreach.
Collaborating Faculty
Leslie McClure is Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. She has diverse research interests, ranging from statistical methodology to environmental epidemiology. Methodologically, Dr. McClure is interested in the design and analysis of randomized clinical trials with multiple outcomes, and methodology for re-estimating sample size in on-going randomized trials. She also works on trying to understand why there are disparities in disease, and what role the environment might play in those disparities. In addition, Dr. McClure loves to teach and to work with students, and has been recognized by the University of Alabama at Birmingham for her outstanding teaching and mentoring skills.
D. Leann Long, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the UAB School of Public Health. After receiving a B.S. in Mathematics from Tennessee Wesleyan College and an M.S. in Mathematics from Tennessee Technological University, she earned her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her doctoral research proposed the marginalized zero-inflated Poisson model, focusing on providing marginal inference for count data with excess zeroes. Dr. Long collaborates with various scientists across UAB, including the REGARDS cohort study examining racial and geographic disparities in stroke mortality in the US. In addition to her participation in Dr. Schwebel’s Youth Safety Lab, she has worked with Dr. Jessica Mirman and Dr. Burel Goodin in the UAB Department of Psychology.
Graduate Students
Casie Morgan is a doctoral candidate in the UAB Medical/Clinical Psychology program. She graduated from Loyola University of Maryland in 2018 with a B.A. in Psychology and Writing and received her M.A. degree from UAB in 2020. Large scale, her research goals include prevention and intervention development for families with children struggling with behavioral and emotional difficulties. More specifically, this includes examining psychosocial influences on child risk behavior, the influence of the family system on child risk-taking behaviors, and parent-child communication breakdowns in the context of behavioral health disparities. In the UAB Youth Safety Lab, Casie is interested in links between behavior problems, supervision, and injury, as her career goals include working with families whose children are diagnosed with behavior and/or developmental disorders.
Yixin Wang is a graduate student in the UAB Developmental Psychology Doctoral Program. She graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a B.A. in Psychology. As an undergraduate, she assisted in investigating the influence of family stress on children’s socioemotional development. In the UAB Youth Safety Lab, her research interests focus on the links between early life stress, externalizing behaviors, risk behaviors, and injury.