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Dennis D. Embry, Ph.D

President, PAXIS Institute, Tucson, AZ USA; and co-investigator, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Biography:

Dr. Dennis D. Embry, Ph.D. launched effective population-level prevention strategies from the late 1970s, beginning with Children’s TV Workshop to reduce the 3rd leading cause of death to pre-schoolers in the U.S. and the Commonwealth. In the 1990s, He designed a powerful violence-prevention study that reduce students bringing knives and guns to schools [23-26]. In 1999, People Magazine [1] profiled it. PAXIS reduced youth tobacco use [27-29]. In Canada, PAXIS reduced a population-level behavioural disorders [3, 30, 31]—especially for Indigenous youth. PAXIS Institute holds the famous recipe above for the Good Behaviour Game® that prevents lifetime behavioural disorders.

In 2010, SAMSHA funded 18 sites to replicate the Hopkins Good Behaviour Game®. It was the first time in SAMSHA history that every one of the grantees replicated prevention results recipe, i.e., our Good Behaviour Game®. Then, SAMSHA proposed a challenge to pick ten school districts to replicate in three months, which happened and was published in Brain and Behavioural Sciences [29].

He as Ph.D. student in the late 1970s, my dissertation was the first effective strategy to reduce the 3rd leading cause of young children—being struck by cars while playing by, or on the road—in collaboration of Sesame Street®, then used nationally by New Zealand. After my dissertation in 1981, and was shortly awarded one of 12 Commonwealth Senior Fellows to replicate the child safety programme nationally. Mission accomplished.

n 1980s, PAXIS is a prevention-science company. Today, we have a network of positive results in North America, the EU, the Commonwealth, and among Indigenous peoples.

We forge a coalition of funders and agents to build, fund, implement and evaluate successful population outcomes. Thus, PAXIS Institute is paid for measurable behaviour results. Today, PAXIS has powerful, replicable prevention strategies in the US, the Commonwealth, the EU, and indigenous sites.

He was named 1-of-100 people in one hundred years who has bettered the lives of children, by the Children’s Welfare League of America. Likewise, he was honoured by the Society for Prevention Research and the Association for Behaviour Analysis International, and as a Commonwealth Senior Research Fellow. Not too shabby for first grader who was placed in special education classroom in Phoenix—a story in its own right.

He was Ph.D. student of the founders of Applied Behaviour Analysis at the University of Kansas (Don Baer, Todd Risley, and Mont Wolf), and student undergraduate leader in the University. He was also the Student Senator who devised the measures of student evaluation for Promotion and Tenure as an Kansas undergraduate. He conducted his first sophisticated randomized trial as an 8th grader to reduce the risk radiation poisoning in space and demanded an adult library card, and got it.