You might say Dorothy Espelage, M.A., ’93, has a bully pulpit. Really.

Now a professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, her curriculum vita lists six years of research and countless articles and presentations on bullying and aggressive behavior in middle schools. She has become one of the national media’s primary sources for expert testimony on the subject.

School shootings in the U.S. made national headlines too often in the 1990s, and a study by the Secret Service found that, in about two thirds of such events during the past 25 years, the attackers had been victims of long-standing and severe bullying. Hence, the media – including USA Today, People Magazine, and Oprah – have been lining up for quotes from Espelage.

In 1998, the year of the school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, Espelage presented her first paper on bullying at a meeting of the American Psychological Association in Toronto, and did 78 media interviews in two days. In 1999, the year of the Oklahoma City and Littleton, Colorado, shootings, she responded to even more media queries.

What she tells them is that most middle-school-age kids engage in, and/or are victims of, bullying – teasing, name-calling, threatening and social ridiculing. For some children, victimization results in anxiety, depression and thoughts of suicide. Sometimes, the victims themselves become bullies.

Espelage says the problem of bullying has increased over past decades. Bullies are encouraged by their peers. Parents, teachers and school administrators tend to see bullying as just a normal part of growing up. And the number one predictor for a kid turning into a bully is lack of parental supervision – a problem that extends across all social and economic levels.

“What we’re doing,” she says, “is creating a climate and culture that supports this kind of behavior, and that’s what we have to change.”

Espelage became interested in psychology when, as a high school student in Moneta, Virginia, she regularly drove her step-father to the Salem V.A. Hospital for his course of cancer treatments. It was while waiting in the hospital cafeteria, observing and talking with psychiatric patients, that she found her calling.

Even as an undergraduate psychology major at Virginia Commonwealth University, earning a Ph.D. was her goal. But Espelage came to RU for a master’s degree because RU had what she wanted.

She wanted a small, student-centered school – one that attracted professors who had made the decision not to pursue a big research institution, but to spend their days teaching and mentoring students. At Radford, Jeffrey Chase, associate professor of psychology, was one such teacher. He was also her adviser, and they met almost daily.

Chase remembers Espelage as able to complete projects without a lot of supervision. Reliable and competent, she exceeded normal expectations. He says was fun to do research with her, because her energy and enthusiasm were infectious.

Espelage says that, although the goal of most students in RU’s master’s program in psychology is clinical practice, students can steer a different course by taking advantage of research opportunities. She stresses that students wanting to work on research projects must be proactive, approaching professors and asking for jobs.

At RU, she enjoyed clinical work, but found 20 hours a week to be too much. Looking for a research subject among the student population, she noticed that many women seemed to relate everything in their lives to food and/or weight, and anorexia and bulimia were often the result. Thus began 10 years of examining patterns of eating disorders.

During her doctoral studies in counseling psychology at Indiana University, Espelage wrote her dissertation on a behavioral comparison of women with and without eating disorders. She continues that line of research today.

While at Indiana, because she excelled at statistics, Espelage was hired under a grant funded by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For that study, she developed a survey to measure the results of intervention in middle schools. The survey showed that intervention had little affect on violence. It also revealed that few kids actually fought physically, but many reported harassment and teasing.

Looking at that population, she found that almost all of the research on bullying had been conducted in other countries, and that the U.S. was 30 years behind. So, she says, “Since 1995, it’s been my mission to study this phenomenon.” And she says she’ll probably keep at it until she retires.

Espelage emphasizes that her research is practically oriented. During her 10 years of studying eating disorders, she’s worked closely with clinicians, helping them apply her findings in their work with patients. She says this provides her “clinical fix.”

Her work on bullying includes going into middle schools every year, interviewing kids, conducting surveys, and providing workshops for teachers, administrators, parents and students.

Of her work on both eating disorders and bullying, she says, “I feel I’m having an impact, taking good research and translating it into something clinicians and teachers can use.”