Jordan P. Davis is an assistant professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work in the department of Children, Youth and Families and the Associate Director of the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society. He has devoted much of his career to interdisciplinary research that addresses substance use and developmental needs of marginalized and vulnerable populations who have experienced some form of trauma (childhood trauma, PTSD, exposure to violence). Davis also focuses on the utility and development of longitudinal data analyses in the structural equation modeling framework.
Davis has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute on Alcohol and Alcoholism, the Fahs Beck Fund for Experimentation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He has been named a Fahs-Beck Scholar, a Society for Social Work Research Doctoral Fellow, and has received numerous awards for his doctoral work on marginalized young adults.
Davis’ primary research focuses on substance use disorder treatment among marginalized youth. Specifically, youth who have been involved in the juvenile (or criminal) justice system, low socioeconomic and education status, and have experienced early childhood trauma or exposure to violence. Davis’ intervention work focuses primarily on Mindfulness Based Interventions and how it can be utilized to address issues facing at risk youth. Davis has conducted the first randomized controlled trial assessing Mindfulness Based Relapse Prevention and the effect on stress, craving and substance use among at risk young adults in residential treatment. Davis’ research spans to understanding both psychological and physiological stress responses and self-regulation and how changes in these systems can alter treatment and developmental outcomes.
Davis also investigates development from adolescence to young adulthood and how early life trauma experiences and concurrent exposure to violence influence development. In particular Davis focuses on the associations between personality development, self-regulation, stress response, and exposure to violence.
Recently, Davis has taken on the task of understanding how development of early life risk and protective factors are associated with sexual violence victimization and perpetration and teen dating violence.
Davis is also interested in how to appropriately and accurately model longitudinal, either clinical or developmental, data. Davis was trained under Dr. Daniel Berry, Dr. Brent Roberts, and Dr. Daniel Briley on longitudinal data analysis methods. He is currently working on expanding and developing new ways to answer developmental questions integrating structural equation modeling and mixture modeling.