Gwendolyn Lawson is a core faculty member at Clinical Futures and PolicyLab and in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. She is a licensed clinical psychologist, with a particular interest in school mental health, disruptive behavior disorders, and classroom consultation.

Dr. Lawson’s research program aims to leverage implementation science methods to increase the quality of services youth with or at-risk for mental health problems receive in community settings, particularly schools. Her current research, funded by a K23 award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), focuses on developing implementation strategies to promote teacher use of behavioral classroom interventions, and testing these strategies through a small-scale hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial.

Dr. Lawson earned her doctorate in psychology with clinical training from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. A former classroom teacher, she completed her predoctoral internship at the University of Maryland’s Center for School Mental Health, where she provided prevention, intervention and consultation services in a Baltimore elementary school. She completed a T32 postdoctoral fellowship in implementation science at Penn’s Center for Mental Health, and is a 2021 Fellow of the Implementation Research Institute (IRI).