Dr. Betty R. Yung

Betty R. Yung, PhD (1945–2012), was a professor in the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Dr. Yung received her doctorate from the University of Kentucky and had been involved in research on violence and other health and social issues affecting ethnic/cultural populations and in program evaluation research for more than 20 years. She served as program research and evaluator coordinator for the PACT program from 1989 to 1994 and conducted training on the PACT model throughout the country. She also served as grants specialist for the School of Professional Psychology and was officer of grants, research, and evaluation for the College of Education and Human Services at Wright State University. Prior to that, she had 10 years of experience in casework and administration of youth programming in a juvenile court setting. Dr. Yung consulted for numerous local and state agencies on program development, grant proposal writing, and program evaluation for children, adolescents, and young adults in a variety of health and education areas. In 1994, she was designated as a Gimbel Child and Family Scholar, an award for service and scholarship in violence prevention. Also in 1994, she and her coauthor, Dr. W. Rodney Hammond, won an award from the Society for Research on Adolescence for the best journal article on adolescent social policy. In 2008, Dr. Yung received a Health Policy Researcher of the Year Award from the Health Policy Institute of Ohio for her study of capacity building needs of minority nonprofit organizations in Ohio. Prior to her death, she had been conducting a large scale study on suicide notes collected over a 10-year span. She was also working with the Ohio Commission on Minority Health and with the Michigan Department of Community Health on cross-site evaluation of their grant health disparity reduction programs and had completed an assessment of the outcomes of a federally funded Safe Schools/Healthy Students grant.