Family Social Science welcomes new Couple and Family Therapy program director
Armeda Stevenson Wojciak will join the University of Minnesota in August to lead the nationally accredited Couple and Family Therapy program – a doctoral degree in the Department of Family Social Science.
She previously served as an associate professor and program director of the Couple and Family Therapy program at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.
She received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a doctorate in Marriage and Family Therapy at the Florida State University. She has developed a robust research program in improving outcomes for at-risk youth and families with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) through interventions that are designed and evaluated across family, foster care, school, and youth camp formats.
Her scholarly work has been published in Children and Youth Services Review, the Journal of Social Work, and Journal of Family Issues, among others. She has contributed chapters to six books on issues around youth in foster care and ACEs.
Wojciak was a founding member of the multidisciplinary team who create the inaugural “Building a Resilient Iowa” workshops for educators, health care, public health, and community agencies to build trauma informed care systems across Iowa’s care systems. This work was underwritten by the Office of Community Engagement at the University of Iowa and the Iowa Department of Human Services. Given this work and Wojciak’s community based participatory designed We Can! Building Relationships and Resilience–a year long, school-wide trauma informed training for educators–she also leads the Building a Resilient Iowa-Education Sector Workgroup.
Nationally she has presented at the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy annual meetings, the Society for Research on Adolescence, National Council on Family Relations and Society for Prevention Research. She has served as the associate editor of the Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy and on the editorial boards of the aforementioned Journal and the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.
In her new role, Wojciak will be responsible for the future direction of the accredited Couple and Family Therapy Program, teaching and advising students and providing clinical supervision as a couple/marriage and family therapist. In addition, she will maintain an externally funded research program and continue to develop her own research agenda and scholarly work.