Jim Vetter was Program Director of the Open Circle Program, based at the Wellesley Centers for Women until 2008. Since 1987, Open Circle has provided social competency curricula and training programs that have touched the lives over 300,000 students in public, private, parochial, urban, suburban, and rural schools in New England and New Jersey. Open Circle is recognized nationally as a science-based program with evidence of effectiveness.
Before joining Open Circle, Jim worked as a conflict resolution and violence prevention specialist, supporting schools and school systems in selecting, implementing, and sustaining science-based social development programs. He also served as Director of the statewide Suicide and Youth Violence Prevention Program of the Virginia Department of Health.
A 1981 graduate of Yale University, Vetter received a Masters in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is co-author of a recent article on the links between violence and suicide that appeared in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior.
Earlier in his career, Jim directed educational theater troupes and worked as a professional actor, mime, and magician.
Dr. Nancy Genero is an associate professor of psychology at Wellesley College where she teaches cultural psychology, culture & social identity, and introductory statistics. For the past fifteen years, she has explored psychological issues that pertain to the lives of diverse groups of women, girls, and their families.
Dr. Genero completed her doctoral training in social psychology at the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor in 1985. After working in the clinical studies unit of the department of psychiatry at UM for three years as a research investigator, she assumed a position at the Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies, now a part of the Wellesley Centers for Women, as a research program director in 1988. That year marked the beginning of her research career on the relational aspects of the psychological development of women and girls. When she started her work in this area, the research literature was extremely limited and reliable research instruments on relational processes were virtually non-existent. Consequently, she published the first validated measure of mutual psychological development (Genero, Miller, Surrey, & Baldwin, 1992). This measure is now widely used in the field and was recently published in the Handbook of Family Measurement Techniques (Perlmutter, Touliatos, & Holden, 2001). With federal funding from the Bureau of Maternal and Child Health, she collaborated with colleagues at the Stone Center to study the relational aspects of depression in mothers of young children.
In 1993, Dr. Genero joined the faculty of the psychology department at Wellesley College where she began to incorporate theories from cultural psychology into her work. The idea that diverse cultural meanings profoundly impact the ways in which women and girls make sense of and adapt to psychological challenges made a lot of sense to her. At the same time, she discovered a growing literature on the negative effects of acculturation stress on identity development and mental health. Although studies called attention to the challenges of the acculturation process (e.g., discrimination and language barriers), few attempted to address how female adolescents make sense of their acculturation experiences and whether close relationships enhanced or diminished their ability to negotiate conflicting cultural demands. The discontinuities between traditional female roles and non-traditional mainstream American values can be a source of conflict between young girls and their families. Moreover, persistent cultural inconsistencies are likely to have serious negative developmental and mental health consequences for adolescents.
Dr. Genero received support for her work in this area from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and the Social Science Research Council. More recently, she received an award of a two-year small grant from the Brachman Hoffmann Fellowship Program at Wellesley College to conduct a community-based study of bicultural Hispanic and Brazilian seventh and eighth grade girls from the Framingham area. She conducted this study in collaboration with Elissa Koff, Ph.D.
In addition to her scholarly and professional research activities, Dr. Genero serves as the director of multicultural programs through the Office of the Dean of the College. In this capacity, she promotes faculty research on cultural topics and mentors students interested in conducting independent research in this area.
Patricia Jahoda Stahl was the Co-Director of Bringing Yourself to Work (BYTW) at the Wellesley Centers for Women until 2008, an innovative training program and book that stressed the importance of emotional intelligence, diversity and self-awareness when working in a care-giving environment. BYTW provided training nationally to after-school, school, early childhood and youth program staff. Additionally, Patricia provided training and keynote speeches at many national conferences.
Patricia has over 25 years experience in training, consulting, and developing innovative educational initiatives for children, adolescents and care providers. She holds a Master’s of Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education. In addition to her work at the Wellesley Centers for Women, Patricia founded Strategic Philanthropy, a consulting practice in which she assists organizations and foundations in identifying and planning their philanthropic programs.
Patricia has been the technical and program consultant for the Girls Action Initiative, a project with the Paul and Phyllis Fireman Charitable Foundation that funded 12 Massachusetts girls’ programs for three years. She also served as the Director of Adolescent Programs at the Boston Children's Museum, during which time she created a vocational development program that offered interactive work opportunities for adolescents in a museum setting.
Patricia’s publications include Bringing Yourself to Work: A guide to Successful Staff Development in After School Programs, 2003; Learning From Girls Action: Building Strengths and Saving Self-Esteem in Early Adolescence, 2000; and Growing Together: A Mutual Exchange, 1996.
Dr. Hill is professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University. During the 2007-2008 academic year she served as a Senior Scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women and as a Newhouse Visiting Scholar at Wellesley College. Her work at Wellesley involved analyzing the nearly 25,000 pieces of correspondence she received in the wake of her testimony at the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for a project titled "Lessons in the Letters: Learning About Race and Gender From the Private Responses to the Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearing." She opened the WCW fall 2007 Lunchtime Seminar Series with a presentation on this topic on October 4th at the Centers' Cheever House. Dr. Hill earned her J.D. from Yale University and her B.S. from Oklahoma State University. Her scholarly publications include:
"Choice, Social Structure, and Educational Policy." Race, Markets and Social Structures. 1st ed. Ed. Emma Coleman Jordan. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2007 (forthcoming)
"The Embodiment of Equal Justice Under the Law." Nova Law Review 31. 2 (2007): 1-19. (forthcoming)
"What Difference Will Women Judges Make? Looking Once More at the "Woman Question"." Women and Leadership: The State of Play and Strategies for Change. 1st ed. Ed. Barbara Kellerman and Deborah Rhode. New York: Jossey-Boss, 2007. 1-29. (forthcoming)
"A History of Hollow Promises: How Choice Jurisprudence Fails to Achieve Educational Equality." Michigan Journal of Race & Law 12. 1 (2007): 107-159.
The Scholarly Legacy of A. Leon Higginbotham: Voice, Storytelling and Narrative. Rutgers Law Review, 2001.
Pam Alexander was a senior research scientist through September 2010 at the Wellesley Centers for Women, where she conducted research on gender-based violence. After getting her Bachelors from Wake Forest University, Dr. Alexander received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Emory University in 1980, was an assistant professor and director of the Psychological Services Center at the University of Memphis, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, and a senior research investigator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Youth and Social Policy.
Dr. Alexander’s research focused on family violence generally, with a particular emphasis on intimate partner violence. She was interested in the role that childhood trauma played in increasing the risk for both the experience and perpetration of intimate partner violence as well as child maltreatment. Her work on the development and evaluation of intervention programs for intimate partner violence was informed by attachment theory with its attention to affect regulation and implicit views of attachment relationships, by motivational interviewing with its emphasis on values and choices, and by mindfulness approaches with their focus on learning to recognize, tolerate and regulate emotions. She believed that taking into account both the intergenerational context of violence as well as the current context of the relationship was essential in understanding, preventing and eradicating gender-based violence.
Dr. Alexander’s research career originally began with a concentration on the long-term effects of incest. In 1986, she received funding by the National Institute on Mental Health to conduct a psychotherapy outcome study on the effectiveness of group therapy for adult female incest survivors. Given the inevitable overlap between different types of violence perpetrated within the family, she began to focus more on the intergenerational transmission of violence, including abusive parenting and the perpetration of and vulnerability to intimate partner violence, with an emphasis on the attachment relationships between parents and children and between intimate partners. Her research was based on clinical samples of men and women (ranging from batterers to battered women and incest survivors seeking services to parents at risk for child abuse) and samples of women recruited from the community (such as adult female incest survivors and mothers with young children). She evaluated both the U.S. Army’s and the U.S. Marines’ New Parent Support Program, a home visitation child abuse prevention program.
Two federally funded projects completed by Dr. Alexander consisted of the following. First, a project funded by the Centers for Disease Control examined the determinants and consequences of readiness to change in a sample of more than 1,500 batterers court-ordered to treatment. Second, a project funded by the National Institute of Justice compared the effectiveness of a stages-of-change/motivational interviewing (SOCMI) model of group therapy with standard batterer treatment for batterers court-ordered to treatment.
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