Kristine Chan specializes in research on children and youth who encounter the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Her work promotes the well-being of youth and their families to achieve an equitable, youth-centered, and collective system of care by understanding their needs and trajectories.

Kristine has extensive knowledge of youth justice systems and probation practices through reviewing hundreds of physical juvenile case files, linking administrative data, and working as a clinician in a secure probation facility for incarcerated youth. Her work highlighted in The Los Angeles County Juvenile Probation Outcomes Study and The Los Angeles County Probation Workgroup has provided county recommendations for youth justice reforms and demonstrated the need for interagency data to drive practice. In her work, Kristine partners with youth and families with lived system experiences, service providers, and system agencies to improve outcomes for justice-involved populations, including those with histories of commercial sexual exploitation and gang violence.

Kristine uses a variety of research methods to capture the holistic experiences of youth in systems of care. She has methodological expertise in mixed-method designs, program evaluation, and a nontraditional web development background as a researcher. Kristine’s knowledge of web programming and graphic design enables her to build data systems, web-based tools, data visualizations, and scrape web data. Recently, she has collaborated with researchers and the Probation Child Trafficking Unit to build a proof-of-design concept to show the potential of a data system to facilitate a shared multidisciplinary team case plan. Kristine is also the web developer for the Children’s Law Center of California, which provides legal representation and specialized services for youth in the dependency court.

Kristine received her PhD in criminology, law, and society from the University of California, Irvine, and an MSW from the University of California, Los Angeles.