Dawn P. Witherspoon, PhD is the McCourtney Family early career professor in psychology at the Pennsylvania State University and is director of Parents And Children Together (PACT) a community-university partnership to enhance the lives of diverse children, youth and families. Witherspoon completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Center for Developmental Science and in the department of psychology's Black Child Training Grant Fellowship Program. Dr. Witherspoon received her doctorate in Community Psychology from New York University. Her research focuses on the ways in which families and youth are influenced by the contexts in which they are embedded, particularly focusing on how neighborhood, family, and race/ethnicity-related factors affect well-being. The crux of her research focuses on place and its relation to other proximal contexts and identifies positive characteristics in multiple contexts that are related to adolescent well-being.