Ada Skyles is the Associate Director and a Research Fellow at Chapin Hall. She has more than two decades of research and direct service experience with human services systems and with legal issues involving children and families. Her interests focus on capacity building in public and community-based agencies, the effectiveness of service systems for children and youth, particularly the experiences of children of color in those systems, and on the legal representation of children. She was a coeditor of a special issue of Children & Youth Services Review that focused on the overrepresentation of children of color in the child welfare system. She has written articles and book chapters on such topics as family relationships, child support, and working with African American children and families in child welfare systems.

Before joining Chapin Hall, she taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the School of Social Work, the School of Medicine, and the Law School, and was affiliated with the Institute for Research on Poverty. Dr. Skyles chairs the Ethics Board for Child Welfare Professionals in the Office of the Inspector General at the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. In this capacity she has conducted numerous workshops and presentations on ethical issues in child welfare practice and agency management. She is the former Chair of the Wisconsin Governor’s Council on Domestic Abuse and former director of the Wisconsin Bureau of Child Support Enforcement. Dr. Skyles received her Ph.D. in social welfare policy from the University of Wisconsin and her J.D. from Northwestern University.