Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick PhD is an associate professor with the Life Course Outcomes Research Program area at the A. J. Drexel Autism Institute. She has a secondary appointment at the Dornsife School of Public Health in the Community Health Prevention Department and a Courtesy Appointment in the Sociology Department. Dr. McGhee Hassrick’s work focuses on investigating how, why and under what conditions social networks impact outcomes for people, collectives and organizations. She contributes to problem-solving sociology by aligning her work with real-world problems, conducted in partnership with communities. Currently, her work includes basic social science research on how and under what conditions social networks influence the outcomes of autistic people during key life transitions. She engages researchers and community partners across disciplines and expertise in intervention science, co-creating and rigorously testing network interventions that support autistic people in school and community settings. Additionally, she has led business translation grant work, using quasi-experimental and lean startup methods to apply network science solutions to support autistic young adults as they transition to adulthood. This includes the development and rigorous testing of the Trestle app which helps autistic young adults build meaningful social networks to support their life goals. Her work also assists existing community and research collaboratives in collecting and using social network data to build better strategic networks, addressing issues such as service capacity for Latino immigrants and mental health crisis service coordination. Dr. McGhee Hassrick is the Director of the Social Dynamics of Intervention (SoDI) Lab, collaborating with students (i.e. high school, undergraduate, graduate, post doctoral), full time research staff and early career scholars to investigate how social network impact our everyday lives and outcomes.

Dr. McGhee Hassrick received her masters and doctoral degrees in Sociology from the University of Chicago and a masters in Education from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Before her career as an academic researcher, she was a classroom teacher for years in public and private schools in the United States and abroad. She has held faculty research positions at the University of Chicago and Weill Cornell Medical College. Her research has been published in peer review journals and funded by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health, SAMSA, the Health Resource and Services Administration, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Spencer Foundation and the National Academy of Education.​