Margaret Kuklinski is the Director of the Social Development Research Group and a Social Work Endowed Associate Professor in Prevention. Margaret Kuklinski’s research and intervention efforts are at the intersection of prevention science and health economics. Her work aims to promote positive developmental outcomes by demonstrating the long-term impact of effective community-based and family-focused intervention, identifying the level of investment needed to improve health and wellbeing through effective intervention, and building policy support for preventive interventions by demonstrating their benefits and costs.

Kuklinski is director of the School’s Social Development Research Group where she supports efforts to disseminate interventions to communities, families and agencies. For more than a decade, she has led or contributed to studies that promote healthy behaviors and positive development. She serves as Acting Director for the Center for Communities That Care and co-principal investigator on the longitudinal evaluation of the Communities That Care prevention system which has demonstrated impact on preventing drug use and antisocial behavior from adolescence into young adulthood. She is also co-principal investigator on a multisite trial testing the feasibility and effectiveness of implementing Guiding Good Choices, a prevention program for parents of adolescents, in three regionally and socioeconomically diverse healthcare systems. She currently co-chairs the Health Economics Working Group for a set of projects funded under NIDA’s HEAL Prevention Initiative aimed at preventing opioid misuse in adolescents and young adults.

As a health economist, Kuklinski has been involved in national efforts, conducted under the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine as well as the Society for Prevention Research, to establish best practices for cost, benefit-cost and cost-effectiveness analysis of interventions for children, youth, and families. She routinely consults and lectures on health economics and prevention science, and is an elected board member of the Society for Prevention Research.