Dr Desmond Runyan (U.S.), Executive Director, Kempe Center
ADDRESS: Lessons from the Long Run: lessons learned in the 25 year LONGSCAN study
Dr Desmond Runyan is the Jack and Viki
Thompson Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado and Executive
Director of The Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse
and Neglect. He joined the Colorado faculty in 2011 after 32 years at the
University of North Carolina where he rose to the rank of professor in the
departments of Social Medicine and Pediatrics.
Dr Runyan served as chair of Social Medicine
from 1999 to 2007. He completed his MD
degree and a pediatric residency at the University of Minnesota and followed
that with a doctorate in public health at the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical
Scholars Program at the University of North Carolina. He is board certified in pediatrics and in
preventive medicine.
Dr Runyan has researched child abuse for over 30 years while
maintaining a clinical practice evaluating possible child abuse victims and as
a general pediatrics attending at UNC. He co-founded a comprehensive child abuse center and has been appointed
to the initial new sub-board of child abuse pediatrics at the American Board of
Pediatrics.
Dr Runyan’s research has
addressed the identification and consequences of child abuse and neglect
including specific patters of abuse such as shaken baby syndrome and Munchausen
Syndrome By Proxy.
In 1989 he designed and secured funding for the longest
multi-site prospective study of the consequences of child abuse; LONGSCAN is
now 21 years old. This is a prospective
study of 1354 children in five states who either were reported for maltreatment
or who were judged to be at very high risk of maltreatment.
In addition to this domestic research, Dr Runyan
has worked with International Clinical Epidemiology Network medical school
faculty in Egypt, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and Chile to increase child
abuse knowledge among medical schools internationally. He has worked with WHO
and UNICEF to study of child abuse epidemiology. With collaboration for Drs Adam Zolotor at
UNC, Michael Dunne at the Queensland University of Technology, and 120 other
scientists from 40 countries, a new set of instruments has been developed to
measure child abuse and neglect.
