Denver (May 27, 2009)

The American Humane Association today announced that Dr. Len Dalgleish of the University of Stirling in Scotland has been named a senior fellow in the American Humane Child Protection Research Center. Dalgleish is professor of decision making in the university’s Department of Nursing and Midwifery, and he heads the HealthQWest decision making research program.

The 131-year-old American Humane Association is the only national organization dedicated to protecting both children and animals. Senior fellows in the organization’s Children’s Division are scholars and practitioners who have dedicated their careers to improving the status of children and have made important and foundational contributions related to American Humane initiatives in the field of child protection. They are a key resource for American Humane and make direct contributions to the organization’s work.

The American Humane Child Protection Research Center, under the direction of John Fluke, Ph.D., focuses on fundamental issues in public child protective services and develops policies and practices to address them. A primary area of attention is improving the assessment and decision-making process within the system, with the goal of making better decisions that, in turn, lead to substantially improved outcomes for children in care.

Dalgleish received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and statistics, and then an honors degree and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Queensland in Australia. In 1981, he moved to the Department of Social Work at the University of Queensland where his interest in applied decision making flourished around the assessment of risk and decision making in child protection cases. In 1988, he moved to the School of Psychology at the university, where he further developed his model for judgment and decision making across a wide variety of applied settings. In 2005, he was appointed to the chair in decision making in the Department of Nursing and Midwifery at Stirling University, and as program head at HealthQWest, which is a research effort focused on decision making in health care.

He has been a keynote speaker at numerous international conferences, where he has shared his research on decision making and its applications to child protection, nursing philosophy, climate forecasting and legal judging. He has presented at more than 40 Australian and international conferences, and has published three books and more than 30 scholarly papers. He has served on the editorial boards of The Australian Psychologist and Child Abuse Review and is currently on the editorial board of Medical Decision Making. 

Dalgleish joins Dr. Patricia Schene of Littleton, Colo., as a senior fellow in the American Humane Child Protection Research Center, and Michael Doolan, who is a fellow in American Humane’s National Center on Family Group Decision Making.   Schene, appointed in 2007, has worked for more than 30 years in the field of child and family services as a state administrator, private agency director, researcher and professor. Doolan, appointed in 2006, provides expertise to child-welfare and youth justice authorities in U.S. and Canadian communities, and formerly was adjunct senior fellow at the School of Social Work and Human Services at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. For more information about American Humane’s Children’s Division, visit www.americanhumane.org/children.