The Life Paths Research Center
A research institute devoted to promoting resilience and social justice through individual, family, and community strengths, especially in Appalachia and other rural and marginalized communities. Life Paths is also the home of ResilienceCon.
Read about our 2024 research study,
Strengths Associated with Resilience
ResilienceCon
ResilienceCon™ is a new approach to conferences that offers a variety of traditional and innovative formats. ResilienceCon is an international conference that offers opportunities to interact with colleagues who are interested in strengths-based approaches to understanding, preventing, and responding to violence and other adversities.
The Life Paths Center Community
At The Life Paths Research Center, we are committed to community and work to create spaces for scholars and advocates to gather and work toward our joint mission of reducing the burden of trauma. To that end, we have several ongoing opportunities for engagement, sharing, and communication.
Books
Strengths-Based Prevention provides practitioners and researchers with the means to make more impactful choices in the design and implementation of prevention programs. Drawing from state-of-the-art research on a range of behavior problems such as violence, drug abuse, suicide, and risky sexual activity, Victoria Banyard and Sherry Hamby present a strengths-based approach to prevention.
Sherry Hamby
Sherry Hamby, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at the University of the South and Director of the Life Paths Research Center. She is also Founder and Co-chair of ResilienceCon. Dr. Hamby is an internationally recognized authority on victimization and trauma who is best known for her work in poly-victimization, resilience, and violence measurement. A licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Hamby has worked for more than 25 years on the problem of violence, including front-line crisis intervention and treatment, involvement in grassroots organizations, and research leading to the publication of more than 200 articles and books. An influential researcher, she has been ranked in the top 1% among more than 6 million researchers in 22 disciplines based on citations to her work. Her awards include Outstanding Contributions to the Science of Trauma Psychology from the American Psychological Association (APA).
Dr. Hamby’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Huffington Post, CBS News, Psychology Today, and hundreds of other media outlets. Her next book, with Victoria Banyard, is Strengths-Based Prevention: Reducing Violence & Other Public Health Problems (forthcoming, APA Books, November 2021).
Sherry Hamby featured in:
