Jo Ann M. Farver (PhD, University of California, LA) received her Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of California at Los Angeles. She has been a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Southern California since 1991. She has been the director of the Undergraduate Psychology Honors program since 1997. Dr. Farver's research and teaching are in the area of Development Psychology and include topics in cross-cultural developmental psychology; children’s community violence exposure; children’s socio-emotional functioning (aggression, bullying, victimization, and prosocial behavior); family and child relations; and the development of emergent literacy skills in young children. Dr. Farver received the Professor of the Year Award from the Gamma Sigma Alpha Honors Society in 2007 and Faculty-Student Research Mentorship Awards in 1992; 1997; 2005; & 2006 from the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching. Her research on the community violence of exposure of young inner-city children was funded by grants from the Zumberge Faculty Research Initiative, the Faculty Innovation Fund, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Currently Dr. Farver is the Principal Investigator of a large scale emergent literacy intervention with multi-ethnic children funded by the National Science Foundation. She also collaborates with Mainland and Hong Kong Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian colleagues on projects involving cultural issues in developmental psychology and on violence against women and children in Beirut, Lebanon.