Dr. Deinera Exner-Cortens now has a view of the Rocky Mountains instead of Lake Huron. As of June 1, 2015, Dr. Deinera Exner-Cortens has come to the University of Calgary, Faculty of Social Work, to join the Shift: The Project to End Domestic Violence team and continue her CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship “Evaluation of a program to prevent adolescent health risk behaviours and promote positive mental health: The role of neurocognition”.

Dr. Exner-Cortens has spent the last year and a half deeply immersed in evaluating violence prevention programs at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s (CAMH) Centre for Prevention Science in London, Ontario. Transitioning to the Faculty of Social Work will allow her to continue her focus on the evaluation and implementation of violence prevention programs in real-world settings.

“I am thrilled to have Dr. Exner-Cortens join our team. Her inter-disciplinary work on adolescent development, specifically the prevention of violence and promotion of healthy relationships, is a significant asset to Alberta,” says Lana Wells, the Brenda Strafford Chair in the Prevention of Domestic Violence and the Director of Shift: The Project to End Domestic Violence.

It was just one year ago that Shift released their strategy – Promoting Healthy Youth Relationships to Prevent Domestic Violence in Alberta in partnership with the CAMH and the Government of Alberta. As part of this strategy, Shift is currently scaling up three best-practice healthy relationships programs across the province, in order to build healthy youth relationships at multiple levels (individual, family, organizational and systemic) and create a province-wide healthy relationships climate. The addition of Dr. Exner-Cortens will enable Shift to comprehensively evaluate this large-scale initiative.