Jean E. Rhodes University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA

Jean Rhodes, Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, is a clinical/community psychologist and expert on youth mentoring. She received her Ph.D. from DePaul University, followed by an APA-accredited Clinical Internship at the University of Chicago Medical School. She has conducted an array of influential research studies that demonstrate both the impact of mentoring programs and the ways in which programs can be structured to best serve children and adolescents in promoting positive developmental outcomes. For instance, she and her colleagues have analyzed longitudinal data that were collected from over 1,000 urban adolescents who participated in a national study of Big Brothers Big Sisters. Her recent book Stand by Me: The Risks and Rewards of Mentoring Today’s Youth (Harvard University Press, 2002) synthesizes the research in ways that are accessible to non-academics. Rhodes is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association and the Society for Research and Community Action and a member of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood. She writes a monthly research column for the www.mentoring.org website, which receives over two million hits per month. Prior to arriving at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, she taught at Harvard University, where she established her reputation as a leader in the field of youth mentoring. Along with Renée Spencer, Rhodes is writing the foundational chapter for David DuBois and Michael Karcher's Handbook of Youth Mentoring, currently in development here at Sage for transmittal this August.