About Trenette

Trenette Clark Goings, Ph.D. LICSW  is the Sandra Reeves Spears and John B. Turner Distinguished Professor in the School of Social Work and the founding director of the INSPIRED Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on racial and ethnic health disparities with a primary emphasis on the epidemiology, etiology, and prevention of substance use among African American and biracial adolescents and young adults. Dr. Goings holds expertise in substance use prevention, big data analysis,  intervention research, and grant writing, and has been invited to speak internationally. Her work has been consistently funded—mostly by the National Institutes of Health—and has yielded publications in leading peer-reviewed journals including Drug & Alcohol Dependence, Addiction, Development & Psychopathology, Addictive Behaviors, and Health Psychology. She is the recipient of the Society for Social Work and Research Deborah K. Padgett Early Career Achievement Award, the Wallace Kuralt Early Career Professorship in the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Making a Difference Ph.D. Alumni Award from the School of Social Work at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Goings completed her undergraduate degrees at Elizabeth City State University (B.A. and B.S.), graduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (MSW), and doctoral degree at Virginia Commonwealth University.