Marsha Kline Pruett, Ph.D., M.S.L., ABPP, is the Maconda Brown O’Connor Professor at Smith College School for Social Work. She has twenty-five years of clinical experience, with expertise in couples counseling, father involvement and coparenting consultation, legal case development for attorneys, mediation, and the design and evaluation of model ADR programs that help solve disputes within and outside of the legal system.
She is a past President of the AFCC Board of Directors and the Social Science Editor of the Family Court Review. She has written extensively for academic and lay audiences, including Your Divorce Advisor: A Psychologist and Attorney Lead You Through the Legal and Emotional Landscape of Divorce (2000, Fireside) and Partnership Parenting (2009, Perseus). Her research on a model continuum of effective and cost-efficient co-parenting services in the Connecticut courts, father involvement, and parenting plans for young children earned her the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts’ Stanley Cohen Award for Distinguished Research.
In collaborative ventures with colleagues, she has designed a grid for decision-making about young children and overnights and a step-up template for increasing parenting time across the age spectrum which are used extensively throughout North America and abroad. She is also embarking on a Coparenting Research Library to which parents and legal professionals will have access to social science research pertaining to family law, along with the ability to get critiques and syntheses of the literature on a regularly updated basis. Currently she is evaluating a widely used online coparenting program. She is an Advisory Committee member and consultant for the Honoring Families Initiative of the Colorado-based Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. In addition to academic venues, she disseminates her work through speaking engagements and consultation to mental health professionals, attorneys, judges, and court personnel.