The winners of the four annual Campbell awards were celebrated today at the Campbell Members’ Meeting, which was held online as a session of the What Works Global Summit 2020. The President of the Campbell Board, Jeremy Grimshaw, announced the following award winners:
The Robert Boruch Award for distinctive contributions to research that informs public policy goes to Emily Tanner-Smith. Emily Tanner-Smith is an associate professor and associate dean in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Oregon. She was selected for the Robert Boruch award for leading research on substance abuse treatment and prevention as well as her work on school recovery schools. She led a series of papers on substance abuse treatment and prevention which were used by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to revise its juvenile drug court guidelines. She is also a long-time contributor to Campbell, and led the development of the Methodological Expectations of Campbell Collaboration Intervention Reviews (MECCIR) in 2013.
The Frederick Mosteller Award for distinctive contributions to systematic reviewing goes to Beth Tipton. Beth Tipton is Associate Professor of Statistics at Northwestern University. Her general area of research is the development and application of statistical methods for the generalisation of causal findings in educational, social and behavioral studies. She was nominated for this award because of her pioneering work on the development of a method to handle dependent effect sizes in meta-analysis, called robust variance estimation (RVE). She then advanced the methods for RVE so that they could be applied to small numbers of studies and she led the development of a diagnostic tool to assess when the methods would work and when they would not. Not stopping at methods development, she also developed software to facilitate its implementation in systematic reviews and led both formal and informal training to support its use.
The Leonard E. Gibbs Award – given to the authors of a completed Campbell systematic review that contributes to evidence-informed practice in social welfare – is awarded to the author team of Tony McGinn, Paul Best, Jason Wilson, Admire Chereni, Mphatso Kamndaya and Aron Shlonsky, for their systematic review “Family group decision making for children at risk of abuse and neglect”. The panel of judges from the Campbell Social Welfare Coordinating Group (SWCG) Editorial Board wrote that they consider the work “very important, rigorous and particularly well-written”. This review, which included 15 studies with 18 study samples, was selected for the importance of the topic, quality of the review, and contributions of evidence for policy and practice in the area of social welfare. This was a comprehensive and rigorous review of a complex intervention for child maltreatment on child safety, permanence, child and family well-being and client satisfaction with the decision-making process.
The John Westbrook Award for Contributions to Knowledge Translation goes to Joann Starks. Committed to the mission and work of Campbell, she has served as the Co-chair of the Disability CG with financial support from the American Institutes for Research since 2017. The John Westbrook award recognizes her specific, deep understanding of disability research and its rigorous vetting and careful synthesis as the knowledge translation process. A long-time colleague and friend of John Westbrook, Joann Starks has made outstanding contributions to knowledge translation and the dissemination and implementation of evidence.
Click here to read more about the Campbell awards and previous winners.