Chapin Hall

Dr. Dana Weiner is a Senior Policy Fellow at the Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. At Chapin Hall, Weiner provides analytic consultation and policy guidance to child welfare jurisdictions across the country, including New York City; Tennessee; Washington, DC; Texas; and California. In her analytic consultation to child welfare jurisdictions, she uses predictive analytics, latent class analysis, and geospatial approaches to refine understanding of target population needs and distribution. In March 2022, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker named Weiner the Director of Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation. In this role, Weiner is building a coordinated response among state agencies to better support children with behavioral health needs.

Weiner served for six years as Senior Policy Advisor to the Director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and as the Evaluation Liaison for the Permanency Innovations Initiative. In 2011, she was appointed by Illinois Governor Pat Quinn to serve on the Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission, and in 2013 was appointed to serve on the Child and Family Services Advisory Council. Weiner teaches Data for Policy Analysis and Management courses to Master’s-level students at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration. She has also taught doctoral-level courses in Research Methods and Statistics at Northwestern University. Weiner’s research has focused on quantifying resource accessibility, analyzing the role of geospatial relationships in outcomes in child welfare systems, and evaluating the implementation of evidence-based models in child welfare and juvenile justice contexts.

Weiner obtained a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Northwestern in 1999 and a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University in 1992.