Brian Bumbarger works to span the boundaries of research, public policy, and practice in support of science-driven organizational and systems change. He is an internationally recognized leader in community collective impact, the adoption and scaling of effective practices, and using implementation science to strengthen families, communities, and public systems. Brian looks forward to expanding Child Trends’ support to states as they strive to improve the equity, effectiveness, and efficiency of their child- and family-serving systems, and especially of their juvenile justice systems.

For over three decades, Brian has conducted research and advised policymakers, communities, universities, and philanthropies on advancing effective, affordable, and equitable strategies and systems to promote the well-being of children and youth; and to foster the dissemination, implementation, and sustainability of evidence-based programs and practices. Brian’s current work focuses on juvenile justice system reform. In 2020, he was appointed by Governor Jared Polis to Colorado’s Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Council, where he serves on the Council’s Executive Committee and chairs the Research and Evaluation Committee. Brian currently holds adjunct faculty appointments in translational research centers at Colorado State University, Penn State University, and Arizona State University, and at the Institute of Criminology at Griffith University (Brisbane Australia).

From 2008-2016, Brian served as founding director and principal investigator of the Evidence-based Prevention and Intervention Support Center (EPISCenter.org), a state-level intermediary that supports communities and government systems in the largest-ever dissemination of evidence-based programs and community collective impact coalitions, with over 300 sites across Pennsylvania. The EPISCenter has been cited internationally as an exemplar for bridging research, policy, and practice to improve child and family outcomes and government services. Brian has served on federal expert panels for the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Administration for Children and Families. He was elected to the Board of Directors of the Society for Prevention Research from 2012-2015 and received the Society’s 2014 Translational Science Award and 2020 Service to SPR Award for his research and service in support of scaling effective prevention practices. Brian has also served on the Board of Directors of the National Prevention Science Coalition and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Coalition for the Promotion of Behavioral Health. He is a founding member of both the Society for Implementation Research Collaboration and the Global Implementation Society.

Brian lives in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado with his wife Jeani, where he enjoys horses and western heritage, snowboarding in the winter, and playing baseball in the summer.