In the War on Drugs, Kenneth Dodge is one of the government's top mercenaries.
The National Institutes of Health awarded Dodge, director of the Center for Child and Family Policy, with a Senior Scientist Award for his research involving adolescent behavior and substance abuse prevention. The grant will support Dodge's research activities over the course of the next five years, paying for salary and overhead costs.
Dodge has been most heavily involved with the Fast Track program, which works with children at high risk for problems like drug abuse, violent behavior, unsafe sexual practices, difficulties in school and juvenile delinquency. Preliminary results from this program show that intervention reduces the risk of hospitalization due to behavioral problems by more than one-third.
"To our delight and rigorous evaluations, it seems that this kind of prevention can have a positive impact on the child's development," Dodge said.
Dodge is also studying how problems evolve throughout children's development by tracking more than 600 children from ages four to 19, which provides researchers with empirical evidence to help them identify at-risk youth.
More recently, he has developed a cost-benefit examination of prevention, exploring the political and practical complications of trying to implement prevention programs in the community.
"[The award will help] continue these programs and synthesize these three different research topics into a broader, more comprehensive understanding of public policy and adolescent behavior problems," Dodge said.
Dodge's application for the award was based on a compilation of projects centering around the development, prevention and policies of adolescent problems.
"Ken's research is cutting edge and he's very deserving of this award," said Barbara Pollock, assistant director of the Center for Child and Family Policy. "Since I began working with Ken almost four years ago, I have seen the Center for Child and Family Policy, under his leadership, emerge as a nationally known center."
Unlike most grants, the Senior Scientist Award supports individual researchers rather than specific projects. The award is a way for the federal government to support research by funding researches at universities rather than bringing them to Washington, Dodge said.
"Only about 30 percent of the proposals we receive are actually funded, so it's a very rigorous process of looking at the applications to ensure that the money is going to the best work and the most promising work," said Michelle Persons, press officer for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a subsidiary of the NIH.
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