Jennifer Loeffler-Cobia is the Director of Justice and Public Health Policy and Practice for WestEd’s Justice and Prevention Research Center (JPRC). She brings over 20 years of experience working in justice, public health, and community settings and is well versed in evidence-based practices to translate research into actionable outcomes of reducing recidivism, violence, and substance misuse. She has expertise building organizational capacity to select and implement evidence-based practices and to advance system change through multisector evaluation, training, and collaboration. She has been instrumental in evidence-based justice system reform in many states.
Loeffler-Cobia currently directs research and training and technical assistant projects on system thinking approaches that address the opioid overdose epidemic and she is a subject matter expert for the National League of Cities’ National Reentry Network.
Through her work, Loeffler-Cobia has co-developed the Evidence-Based Practice System Calibration Process™ for using data to drive system change. Most recently, she has developed the online Building Second Chances: Readiness Assessments for Local Reentry Coalitions for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to assist organizations to implement evidence-based reentry best practices. She has developed and published multiple organizational assessments and continuous quality improvement and evidence-based practice implementation tools and resources for use in community-based and justice organizations focused on system change.
Prior to joining WestEd, Loeffler-Cobia was the Director for the National Reentry Resource Center and the Children Exposed to Violence Training and Technical Assistance Center. She led the data collection for the Research on Lowering Violence in Communities and Schools multiyear study and has been a subject matter expert for the Pay for Success Criminal Justice Permanent Supportive Housing Demonstration Project in Prince Georges County, MD and Center for Addiction Research and Effective Solutions.
Loeffler-Cobia holds a BS in public health and MS in health evaluation and research from Utah State University and has a doctoral degree in public health from the University of South Florida.