Juan Lorenzo Benavides

Juan Lorenzo Benavides, MSW, LSW, is a PhD candidate and licensed social work professional with over eight years of practice experience in child abuse assessment and management, sexual-abuse investigations, acute trauma crisis intervention, and severe mental health crisis intervention, having worked at The Mayo Clinic, Texas Children’s Hospital, and Nationwide Children’s Hospital with children, adults, and their families. He bridges research with frontline clinical social work practice, investigating resilience trajectories of children in the child welfare system and the well-being of providers serving them. In his dissertation—Exploring Prosocial Skills, Health, and Mental Health Trajectories Among Children in the Child Welfare System: The Role of Multi-Level Factors—he applies advanced longitudinal SEM techniques to disentangle within-person temporal dynamics and chart the joint development of prosocial skills and mental health symptoms across three waves. Juan published 18 articles in prominent peer-reviewed journals including but not limited to Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, Child Development, Development and Psychopathology, and Clinical Social Work Journal. His publications feature two first-author articles, a toolkit (co-developed with frontline medical social workers) that offers practical strategies for reducing secondary traumatic stress in graduating social workers, and a qualitative study, In the Wake of Trauma: Strategies and Stories of Resilience from Emergency Room Social Workers. Juan has presented 29 times at regional, national, and international conferences including Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR), Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) Annual Program Meeting, and American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) Annual Colloquium. Juan is proficient in qualitative and advanced quantitative methods. In recognition of his excellence in scholarship, Juan received the Graduate Enrichment Fellowship, the Columbus–Athens Schweitzer Fellowship, and the University Outreach Student Award. Juan has taught courses in Family Violence, Psychopathology, and Social Work Ethics at graduate and undergraduate levels. He’s poised to teach courses such as Research Methods, Child Welfare Policy, and micro-, mezzo-, and macro-level practice. Juan is expected to graduate in May 2026.