1. Research & Initiatives
  2. Research Centers & Labs
  3. Youth-Nex
  4. Youth-Nex Projects

Youth-Nex Projects

Youth-Nex engages around these three goals:

  • To provide rigorous, timely, evidence-based research that informs and is informed by practice and policy,
  • To realize the synergies of an interdisciplinary research center situated in a university with distinguished educational scholars and able students,
  • ​To provide a community of scholarship where faculty, researchers, and students are supported in their scholarly efforts.

Youth-Nex acts around these values:

  • The assets of youth (capabilities, talent, and motivation) are foundational resources for innovation and problem-solving that societies often overlook at their peril,
  • Policies, programs, and settings pertinent to youth must be informed by sound science that guides how youth assets are understood, applied, and promoted,
  • Optimizing the advancement and use of asset-based knowledge about youth requires multidisciplinary, cross-sector partnerships, and
  • To assure relevance and applicability, youth have a role to play in efforts to develop and apply new knowledge.

You can learn more about our research through our current and ongoing projects linked at the left. Through those projects, we are working to promote positive youth development in the areas of Avoiding Risk, Educational Systems: Middle School, Engaged Citizenship, Healthy Lifestyles, and Supportive Relationships. 

Our center is also affiliated with research labs. We invite you to explore those below.

Affiliated Labs

  • PIT CREW
  • Research Lab

Preventive Interventions Team: Collaborative Research on Engagement and Wellbeing

We are a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research lab with a focus on prevention interventions that optimize implementation of evidence-based practices to improve behavior, classroom, and school experiences for youth and school personnel, and/or reduce risk for behavioral and mental health problems. 

  • READY
  • Research Lab

Relationships, Ecologies and Activities for Developing Youth Lab

We are interested in how settings and interactions can be optimized to best meet adolescents’ developmental needs. In particular, we are focused on the role that relationships (with peers, mentors, non-familial adults) and activities play in adolescent development.

  • YVP
  • Research Lab

Youth Violence Project

The Virginia Youth Violence Project is a research group composed of faculty and graduate students in the UVA School of Education and Human Development. We conduct research on youth violence prevention and school safety and provide training and consultation on topics such as threat assessment, bullying prevention, and forensic psychology. Through our work, we have developed strong evidence in support of school threat assessment as a school violence prevention strategy and alternative to zero tolerance discipline.