Dr. Jensen is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work, the Associate Director for Research in the Collaborative for Implementation Practice, and a Family Research and Engagement Specialist in the Jordan Institute for Families at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Jensen’s scholarship focuses on promoting family well-being in diverse contexts; strengthening family-serving systems; and centering equity in family research, practice, and policy. Specifically, Dr. Jensen’s work attends to families experiencing relationship transitions and shifts in parental structure; family maltreatment prevention among military-connected families; promoting the use of data and evidence in family-serving systems; understanding the role of trusting relationships in optimizing the uptake of effective programs and practices in family-serving systems; advocating for inclusive definitions of family; and centering equity in the theory and methods used to study and support families.
Dr. Jensen’s professional activities are connected to more than 5.2 million dollars in extramural funding, including support from the National Institutes of Health, The Duke Endowment, the William T. Grant Foundation, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Jensen is co-founder and co-chair of the Diverse Family Structures Focus Group of the National Council on Family Relations, which has amassed over 130 scholars across the country and globe aiming to align research, practice, and policy with the complex realities of family relationships. He is also the leader of the Family Measurement Node and Steering Committee Member of the Life Course Intervention Research Network. As an award-winning educator, Dr. Jensen specializes in delivering graduate-level content related to family dynamics, child development, program evaluation, and advanced quantitative methodology.