Rachele Espiritu, Ph.D.

Research Instructor, Department of Pediatrics
Director of Evaluation, Center for Child and Human Development

• B.A., University of California, San Diego, 1992
• M.A., University of Colorado, Boulder, 1995
• Ph.D., University of Colorado, 1998

Contact Information:

Dr. Rachele Espiritu is the Director of Evaluation for Georgetown University's Center for Child and Human Development, University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCDD). She has over 12 years of research and evaluation experience in children's mental health, substance abuse prevention, and juvenile delinquency. She currently assists states and communities in building culturally competent evaluation capacity for children's behavioral health services and interagency information systems. Dr. Espiritu also conducts a program evaluation for a project designed to increase families' access to comprehensive services from managed care organizations that meet all needs of their children/youth with special health care needs. Before coming to Georgetown, Dr. Espiritu was the Project Director for a national cross-site evaluation of 15 federally-funded mentoring programs related to substance abuse prevention. She has received two Distinguished Service Awards from the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for her contributions to the field. She also served as invited member of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's Study Group on Very Young Offenders.

Representative Publications:

• Gee, R.L., Espiritu, R.C. and Huang, L.N. (in press). Adolescents with Co-Occurring Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders in Primary Care. In Arredondo, R. & Schydlower, M. Adolescent Medicine: State of the Arts Review: Clinics of North America's Adolescent Medicine Clinics.
• Bellamy, N., Springer, U.F., Sale, E., Espiritu, R.C. (2004) Structuring a multi-site evaluation for youth mentoring programs to prevent teen alcohol and drug use. Journal of Drug Education, 34(2): 197-212.
• Huizinga, D.H., Weiher, A., Espiritu, R.C., et al. (2003). Delinquency and crime: Some highlights from the Denver Youth Survey. In Thornberry, T.P. & Krohn, M.D. (Eds.), Taking Stock of Delinquency: An Overview of Contemporary Longitudinal Studies (pp 47-92). New York, NY: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

More Publications at PubMed

Related Links:

• Center for Child and Human Development