Steering Committee Member

Associate dean of research at usc SUZAN DWORAK-peck School of Social Work

Dr. Charles D. Kaplan is a retired Research Professor and Associate Dean of Research at the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. He continues his research on healthy lifestyles, human service implementation and social and clinical epidemiology focusing on clinical and community samples. His training as a medical sociologist began with doctoral studies at UCLA supported by a National Institute of General Medical traineeship. He conducted early research in neurosociology studying the effects of language and visual imagery on hemispheric interaction and the experience of pain and alexthymia. He has a long career in Europe in Germany and the Netherlands. He is an early developer of the German Biographical Method and Maastricht Social Network Analysis, two widely used social work practices in drug counseling and mental health treatment planning in the European Union. He was the Founding Director of Addiction Research Institute at the Department of Social and Preventative Psychiatry, Erasmus University Rotterdam and later of the Drug Research Division of the Institute for Psychosocial and Socioecological Research, Department of Psychiatric Epidemiology at Maastricht University, The Netherlands.  He has conducted studies of the effect of lifestyle and social networks on persons with substance use disorders and on the metamemory and cognitive decline of primary care patients. He is a developer of the evidence-based Moti-4 prevention program for the social integration of problematic cannabis users. His continuing research has been on patient-centered outcomes and the role of policy and practice advocacy in the community. This research includes the therapeutic, spiritual, and recreational use of cannabis and the current revival of psychedelic drugs. His recent contributions to neurosociology have been in the methodology of hyperscanning for the collection and analysis of EEG data, the role of healthy lifestyle in the treatment and prevention of cognitive decline in diverse ageing populations and the assessment of PTSD, intergenerational transfer and isolation and liberation of the collective memory of extreme trauma in genocide survivors.