Leah N. Bartley

2008-2010 Fellow

Leah completed her undergraduate work at N.C. State University, where she graduated cum laude with a degree in Social Work and a minor in Spanish and pursued her interest in child welfare. Her desire to be involved in direct service led her to Charleston, S.C., in June 2005, where she became a student support specialist for Communities in Schools of Charleston. During her three years there, she supervised an after-school program, developed workshops for parents, organized volunteers and solicited support from the business community. After her fellowship, Leah joined the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN) at UNC Chapel Hill’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute and provided intensive implementation support to Ohio’s scale-up of Differential Response, the California Partners for Permanency, and Arizona’s Fostering Readiness Project. In 2017, she earned a Ph.D. at University of Maryland’s School of Social Work and was awarded a Doris Duke Fellowship for her dissertation. In her first three years of the doctoral program, Leah also worked as a Project Manager for Family Connections, a child maltreatment prevention program. She recently accepted a position as an Investigator and Implementation Specialist at UNC’s NIRN and is working with the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption and the Annie E. Casey Foundation to apply implementation science best practices.