Jan Greenberg

Position title: Professor Emeritus, Social Work

Email: jan.greenberg@wisc.edu

Phone: (608) 262-1044

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School of Social Work
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Curriculum Vitae

About

My research focuses on how aging parents and their family relationships are altered by unexpected events in the lives their adult children. My early work focused on how the lives of aging parents were disrupted by major life stressors in the lives of their adult children, including divorce, alcoholism, and serious mental health problems. For the past two decades, my research has focused on how problems in the lives of adult children associated with having an intellectual disability or mental illness affects the physical and mental health of aging parents, and the rippling effects on intergenerational family relationships.

I have been the PI or Co-PI on several NIH-funded studies examining the long-term toll of caregiving on the health and mental health of aging families of persons with serious mental illness and persons with developmental disabilities. Several of these studies involve the collection and analysis of biomarker data and investigate the toll of daily and chronic caregiving stressors on the health of aging parents. More recently, I have been involved in the study of how the death of a child affects the well-being of parents. This work has been done in collaboration with Drs. Song, Mailick and Floyd. I also have served as the Director of an NIMH predoctoral training program on families and mental health services, and a faculty mentor for both the Hartford Faculty Scholars Program and the Institute on Aging and Social Work. I currently serve as a faculty mentor on the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in IDD Research, administered at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison for the past 20 years.

CDE research theme area affiliations

Health and the Life Course; Fertility, Families, and Households

Selected Publications

Namkung, Eun Ha, Jan S. Greenberg, and Marsha Mailick. “Well-Being of Sibling Caregivers: Effects of Kinship Relationship and Race.” Gerontologist 57, no. 4 (2017): 626-36. PubMed Central ID 5881720.

Smith, Leann, Jinkuk Hong, Jan S. Greenberg, and Marsha Mailick. “Change in the Behavioral Phenotype of Adolescents and Adults with Fxs: Role of the Family Environment.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 46, no. 5 (2016): 1824-33. PubMed Central ID 4826830.

Maenner, Matthew, Jan S. Greenberg, and Marsha Mailick. “Association between Low Iq Scores and Early Mortality in Men and Women: Evidence from a Population-Based Cohort Study.” American journal on intellectual and developmental disabilities 120, no. 3 (2015): 244-57. PubMed Central ID 4795820.

Woodman, Ashley, Leann Smith, Jan S. Greenberg, and Marsha Mailick. “Change in Autism Symptoms and Maladaptive Behaviors in Adolescence and Adulthood: The Role of Positive Family Processes.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 45, no. 1 (2015): 111-26. PubMed Central ID 4289113.

Namkung, Eun Ha, Jiieun Song, Jan S. Greenberg, Marsha Mailick, and Frank Floyd. “The Relative Risk of Divorce in Parents of Children with Developmental Disabilities: Impacts of Lifelong Parenting.” American journal on intellectual and developmental disabilities 120, no. 6 (2015): 514-26. PubMed Central ID 4624231.

Wheeler, Anne, Donald Bailey, Elizabeth Berry-Kravis, Jan S. Greenberg, Molly Losh, Marsha Mailick, Montserrat Mila, et al. “Associated Features in Females with an Fmr1 Premutation.” Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders 6 (2014). PubMed Central ID 4121434.

Wolfe, Barbara, Jieun Song, Jan S. Greenberg, and Marsha R. Mailick. “Ripple Effects of Developmental Disabilities and Mental Illness on Nondisabled Adult Siblings.” Social Science & Medicine 108 (2014): 1-9. PubMed Central ID 4079586.