Susan Sheridan, founding director of the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools and George Holmes Professor of Educational Psychology, is retiring this month after 28 years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“I wanted to build upon the foundation that was here at Nebraska and take it to new levels,” Sheridan said in reflection of her career at the university. “And the opportunities that I had when I came were unparalleled. I was surrounded by great people. I was given some rein to define what I wanted to do and make it happen. And I couldn’t have been in a better place with the people and the opportunities here.”
Sheridan, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Western Illinois University and completed her doctorate in 1989 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, pursued the school psychology field because of the opportunities to work with families and children and intervene in ways to help support their healthy development.
She joined the school psychology faculty in the Department of Educational Psychology at Nebraska in 1998 after beginning her career at the University of Utah.
“Historically, Nebraska has always been the place for school psychology,” Sheridan said. “We were, and we continue to be, among the very best school psychology programs in the country. I was following in the footsteps of real leaders in the field.”
Over the course of her career, Sheridan has received more than $75 million in grant funding and authored more than 230 books, chapters and articles. She was the first UNL faculty member to be elected to the National Academy of Education, an honorific society consisting of more than 300 U.S. members and international associates elected based on outstanding education-related scholarship.
Sheridan’s primary research area is a model of service delivery known as Teachers and Parents as Partners, which focuses on bringing parents, teachers, and other care providers together to develop positive relationships and address concerns they share for children. Her work has also examined early childhood education and development, children’s social-emotional skills, rural education, and parental engagement.
Shortly after arriving at Nebraska, Sheridan began building what would become the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools (CYFS), which was officially founded in 2004 as an interdisciplinary research center within the College of Education and Human Sciences.
“When I started my career and I began focusing on growing a research program, I was really left on my own,” Sheridan said. “When I came to Nebraska and had this opportunity to start the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools, I wanted to turn that on its head and do just the opposite. We need to provide the kind of partnership and collaboration that’s necessary to do the best work that we can do.”
CYFS currently has 110 research affiliates across all four University of Nebraska system campuses, including five colleges and the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Research activities from CYFS and its affiliates have extended across all 93 counties and nearly 300 communities across Nebraska. The Center’s research has been supported by 435 grants, with a 40% grant submission success rate from 2004-26. During that time, more than 21,000 educators and 3,500 early childhood settings and K-12 schools had engaged in CYFS research in the U.S. and abroad.
“It’s really humbling to think about the breadth and the scope of work that we’ve been able to accomplish, not only here in Nebraska, but worldwide. And it’s been through partnerships that we’ve had that opportunity.”
Sheridan is proud that her own work, as well as the work done by CYFS, has impacts beyond the children and families with whom they’ve directly interacted because of the focus on building community support along the way. She points to the way CYFS has sought out and built partnerships in communities while learning from the people whose lives their work was meant to help.
“We’ve learned from them as much as, hopefully, they’ve learned from us.”
