Chapin Hall

María Gandarilla Ocampo is a Senior Researcher at Chapin Hall. In this role, Gandarilla Ocampo supports research across several state-funded human services projects that aim to improve the well-being of children and families. Gandarilla Ocampo’s projects mainly focus on child welfare, and she provides guidance to jurisdictional partners on their Child and Family Services Review (CFSR) as well as on implementing the Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) provisions of the Family First Prevention Services Act. She also assists jurisdictions in leveraging their data to inform intervention design and evaluation to prevent unnecessary contact or extended contact with child welfare systems.

Prior to joining Chapin Hall, Gandarilla Ocampo was a Research Fellow at Evident Change. Her work mainly focused on Casey Family Programs or state funded Community Response Guide projects, which aimed to improve child abuse and neglect reporting. In these projects, Gandarilla Ocampo helped jurisdictions understand their child abuse and neglect reporting landscape using mixed methods and community engaged research. Gandarilla Ocampo served as the research lead across four jurisdictional sites, and supported two others, to inform the intervention and/or evaluation design of these projects.

Gandarilla Ocampo received her doctorate in social work from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, where she focused on child maltreatment mandated reporting. During her doctoral education, she served as a graduate assistant in various projects that involved 1) linking, managing and analyzing administrative data at the state and national level, 2) leading research and evaluation design, and 3) coordinating efforts to disseminate research to child welfare agency leaders.

Gandarilla Ocampo holds a Master of Social Work from California State University, Long Beach during which she completed a thesis on the mandated reporting behavior of afterschool staff and participated in the Title IV-E child welfare stipend program. She also holds a Bachelor of Social Work from California State University, Long Beach.