Tonya Edmond serves as the Brown School’s associate dean for social work, and she is a faculty fellow in the Office of the Provost working on women faculty leadership development and other diversity and inclusion initiatives. She is the co-director of the Center for Violence and Injury Prevention and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Mental Health Services Research. In 2023, Edmond was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Social work and Social Welfare.
Edmond focuses her research on testing the effectiveness of interventions for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, sexual assault, sex trafficking and intimate partner violence. She is committed to strengthening services for survivors through research and teaching to advance the development of trauma-informed systems of care and the implementation of evidence-based trauma treatments. She is currently the principle investigator of a Department of Justice-funded study testing the effectiveness of a learning collaborative as an implementation strategy to enhance the uptake of Cognitive Processing Therapy in rape crisis centers. She also teaches “Intervention Approaches with Women” and “Core Concepts in Trauma Treatment with Children & Adolescents”. Prior to coming into academia, she practiced for 15 years in clinical and administrative roles in domestic violence and rape crisis centers.