Kayla Herbell

Kayla Herbell, PhD, RN, is an assistant professor in the Martha S. Pitzer Center for Women, Children, and Youth at The Ohio State University College of Nursing. Herbell’s program of research is devoted to optimizing treatment gains for adolescents who access residential treatment by way of providing their caregivers with tailored education and support. Herbell’s research is inspired by her time working as a staff nurse at a residential treatment center, during which she noticed that adolescents and their families faced a lot of challenges and little support in their transition back to the community. This experience taught her that in order to enact change, population-specific interventions would need to be developed with family input, and health policy enacted for these families' trajectories to change. She now conducts research with parents as partners in the research process, advocates for residential treatment reform through family-focused scholarship and presents her findings to stakeholders in the community to develop evidence-informed policies to improve care. Read her white paper on Family Engagement in Residential Programs and visit her Families in Transition FIT Study website.