Samuel McQuillin is an Associate Professor and a School Program Director of University of South Carolina, Department of Psychology. He is mainly specialized and currently working on youth empowerment in schools and System Research Lab.
As faculty in the School Psychology Ph.D. program, Professor Samuel McQuillin prepares future scientist-practitioners who want to work with school-aged children and their caregivers. After graduating, his doctoral students have been employed in hospitals, academic research settings, private practice, and K-12 school settings. Professor Samuel McQuillin is also affiliated with the department’s Quantitative Psychology Area of Emphasis and he serves as a quantitative methodologist on a broad range of research projects.
He studies how schools and communities can work together to promote emotional, behavioral, and academic wellness in children who are environmentally or developmentally at-risk. His work focuses on translating theories of child development to pragmatic prevention and intervention strategies. He is particularly interested in how and why relationships between young people and adult helpers (e.g. mentors) promote positive youth development. In this work, he hopes to improve the positive influence of these relationships by equipping helpers with skills and knowledge gleaned from research evidence.
about his keynote
Dr. McQuillin will open the conference by entertaining the question “What is Evidence-Based Mentoring?”, sharing lessons learned from his program of research on developing and evaluating youth mentoring programs. He will propose a three-part definition to Evidence-Based Mentoring and discuss how the field of mentoring might benefit from and benefit other helping professions and institutions through formal and informal mentoring.