Ron Avi Astor, the Richard M. and Ann L. Thor Professor of Urban Social Development at the USC School of Social Work and professor at the USC Rossier School of Education, was selected to become a 2012 fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

The prestigious title has been given to fewer than 500 education scholars nationwide. AERA, the oldest and largest educational research association in the world, established the Fellows Program in 2007 to honor education researchers with substantial research accomplishments.

Astor’s internationally recognized research examines the role of the physical, social-organizational and cultural contexts in schools related to different kinds of school violence. School safety researchers in Israel, France, California, China, Taiwan and Chile are currently using his work, which has been highly cited and widely published. He has more than 150 scholarly publications to his credit.

Now the principal investigator of Building Capacity in Military-Connected Schools, Astor oversees the four-year, $7.6 million Department of Defense Educational Activity program aimed at improving school climate and addressing the special needs of students with family members in the armed services. Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, visited USC in January to recognize the team’s work to support these K-12 students in eight school districts.

Astor’s book, School Violence in Context: Culture, Neighborhood, Family, School, and Gender, published by Oxford University Press, earned runner-up to the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award in 2006, followed by AERA's Outstanding Book Award in 2007. Columbia University’s Teachers College Press will publish four more of his books this summer. 

Astor has also developed an award-winning school mapping and local monitoring procedure that can be used with students and teachers to generate "grassroots" solutions to safety problems. The mapping procedure, which received AERA's prestigious Palmer O. Johnson Award for best research article in 2000, is used in schools across the globe, including Los Angeles and Israel.

Among other notable awards, Astor won AERA's Distinguished Research Award twice in human development and counseling in 2006 and 2010, and the AERA Promise Award in 2011. In 2010, he received an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College. Previously, Astor was a Fulbright Senior Scholar, a National Academy of Education post doctorate fellow and a recipient of a Guggenheim dissertation fellowship.

Astor will be officially inducted at a special ceremony at AERA’s 2012 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia this April. He was also recently appointed to the editorial board of the AERA journal Review of Educational Research and to a new AERA task force on bullying aimed at creating policy based on science and research.