Sheila M. McMahon, Ph.D., M.Div., MSW, LCSW (she/her) is currently the Visiting Scholar at the Center for Restorative Justice, University of San Diego. She co-chairs the Restorative Justice Network of Catholic Campuses (RJNCC), which assists in implementation of restorative practices on member campuses. Her research and practice interests center on campus-based and community-level interventions, such as restorative justice (RJ) and transformative justice (TJ), to prevent and address sexualized violence, build a sense of community, and strengthen individual and collective well-being. She is engaged in collaborative research nationally which focuses on the role of trauma-informed, system-aware restorative justice (RJ) responses to sexual harm.
She was the PI for the first study in the U.S. about early adopters of RJ and TJ for campus sexual misconduct; served as Co-PI for a pilot study on restorative justice responses to military sexual trauma (MST); and is a Co-PI for an OVW-funded $8 million grant for a 5-year research and evaluation project led by the NYU Center for Violence Recovery on restorative responses to sexual harm and intimate partner violence. As a program evaluator, she is the PI for a restorative empowerment evaluation (EE) process that examines RJ implementation on Catholic campuses in the U.S. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School and later Rutgers University School of Social Work, she is a licensed clinical social worker in Florida and New Hampshire, USA.