Child Abuse and Family Violence

Cody Hollist is a licensed independent marriage and family therapist who specializes in the treatment of complex trauma, particularly childhood sexual abuse. He leads the Trauma and Resiliency Explored Laboratory (T-REx) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which pursues in-depth examination of how traumatic experiences, whether personal or societal, leave enduring marks on psychological and social well-being. He has worked extensively in many regions of Brazil to strengthen families in the face of significant adversity, including building family supports for those who have a child with microcephaly resulting from Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome. He received a Fulbright Scholar award to work in Sao Paulo addressing high suicide rates among young adults who experienced childhood trauma. In Rio Grande do Sul, his team uses a community-based participatory research approach to address the harm caused by growing up in extreme poverty in high-risk neighborhoods. Hollist, an associate professor in the Department of Child, Youth and Family Studies, is former director of UNL’s Marriage and Family Therapy program, former president of the Nebraska Marriage and Family Therapy Association, and former director of UNL's Global Experiences Office. As a chaplain in the Air National Guard, he deployed to the Middle East in 2018. His teaching includes clinical training for family therapists and for elementary educators working with children and families who have experienced trauma. (Updated December 2024)

Sociologist Kimberly Tyler studies dating violence and substance misuse among college students and youth experiencing homelessness. She has published multiple research articles examining how dating violence and campus sexual assault are influenced by mental health, racial or ethnic background, substance misuse and sorority membership, among other factors. Other topics of interest include child abuse and neglect and HIV risk behaviors. In August 2022, she and her team were awarded a five-year grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study risk factors and coping behaviors among youth experiencing homelessness and create a “just-in-time” personal support intervention tool using a mobile phone app. Tyler is the George Holmes University Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and serves as the co-director of the Longitudinal Networks Core for UNL’s Rural Drug Addiction Research Center. She teaches upper-level courses on families and family violence. (Updated January 2025.)

David J. Hansen is director of the Clinical Psychology Training Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His primary research area is child maltreatment, which includes sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect and witnessing domestic violence. Another area of expertise is social skills assessment and intervention with children and adolescents. He is co-director of the Family Interaction Skills Clinic and Director of Project SAFE, a clinical treatment program for sexually abused children and their families.

David DiLillo received a Ph.D in clinical psychology from Oklahoma State University in 1997. His primary research interests are in the area of family violence, including child maltreatment and marital and couple violence. He has particular interest in long-term functioning of adult survivors of childhood trauma and understanding revictimization that occurs during childhood or adolescence and again in adulthood. Recent projects in his research group have focused on marital adjustment of childhood maltreatment survivors, psychosocial mediators of revictimization, emotional influences on intimate partner violence perpetration and development of a web-based measure of child maltreatment. His research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National institute of Child Health and Human Development.