Jill Duerr Berrick

Jill Duerr Berrick is a Distinguished Professor and the Zellerbach Family Foundation Professor of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, with a joint appointment as Professor II at the University of Bergen, Norway. She currently serves as chair of the undergraduate major in the School of Social Welfare and has been a faculty member at UC Berkeley since 1990, progressing from Research Specialist and Lecturer to full Professor.

Dr. Berrick's research focuses on the child welfare system, particularly examining child protection services for vulnerable families. Her work targets the intersection of poverty, childhood development, parenting, and service systems designed to address family well-being. She approaches research by centering the voices of service system consumers and providers to identify impacts of social problems and solutions on family life. Her influential works have examined kinship foster care benefits and limitations, characteristics of effective foster caregivers, and human impacts of poverty-related policies.

Her publications reveal a strong focus on comparative international child protection systems, with particular attention to the U.S. and Norway. Recent work emphasizes public perceptions of child protection, racial/ethnic disparities in child welfare systems, mental health services for youth in care, and policy reforms related to child support enforcement in foster care contexts. She has developed a Global Typology for Child Protection systems based on data from 50 countries across six continents.

• Zellerbach Family Foundation Professorship
• Distinguished Professor title
• Co-founded Berkeley Hope Scholars program for students with foster care experience
• Former chair of Committee on Undergraduate Scholarships, Honors, and Financial Aid (CUSHFA)
• Former chair of Admissions, Enrollment, and Preparatory Education committee

Dr. Berrick has secured numerous research grants totaling millions of dollars from organizations including the Norwegian National Research Council, National Institute of Mental Health, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and California Endowment. She actively mentors students through research projects and directs the FamiliesNotFees initiative, working with students to reform policies requiring birth parents to pay for foster care stays. Her international collaborations, particularly with Professor Marit Skivenes at the University of Bergen, have produced significant cross-national research on child protection systems.

She maintains active research teams focused on child protection systems, foster care policy reform, and mental health services for youth in care, with ongoing projects including 'CPS-World' funded by the Norwegian National Research Council and the 'Foster care mental health family navigator' study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.