About

Dr. Sullivan is a professor of Ecological/Community Psychology, senior fellow of University Outreach and Engagement, and the Associate Chair of the Psychology Department at Michigan State University. She has been an advocate and researcher in the movement to end violence against women since 1982. Dr. Sullivan’s areas of expertise include developing and evaluating community interventions for battered women and their children, and evaluating victim services. Her research has been continually funded by federal grants since her career began in 1989 (including grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institute of Justice). Her most recent NIMH grant (2007-2012) is an IP-RISP grant (“Interventions and Practice Research Infrastructure Program”), that she received with Drs. Deborah Bybee, Rebecca Campbell, and Celia Wills. This award will allow the investigators to collaborate with Turning Point, Inc., a well-established domestic violence-rape crisis mental health services organization, to develop a research infrastructure in a community setting that is supportive of collaborative research on mental health services for battered women and rape victims. The five-year project will result in a community-based research infrastructure able to support and sustain a wide variety of research studies pertaining to the mental health consequences of intimate and sexual violence.

In addition to consulting for numerous local, state and federal organizations and initiatives, she conducts workshops on;

(1) effectively advocating in the community for women with abusive partners, and their children;
(2) understanding the effects of domestic abuse on women and children;
(3) improving system responses to the problem of violence against women; and
(4) evaluating victim service agencies.

In addition to her MSU appointments, Dr. Sullivan is also the (pro bono) Director of Evaluation for the Michigan Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence and the Senior Research Advisor to the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence.

For more information about The Community Advocacy Project, a home-based advocacy intervention that has been experimentally and longitudinally evaluated across three years, click HERE.

A website for the Community Advocacy Project, complete with training materials and tools that can be downloaded at no charge, can be found here: CAP resources.