Jean Rhodes is the Frank L. Boyden Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is also co-founder of MentorPRO, a platform for advancing effective mentoring and training. Dr. Rhodes has devoted her career to understanding positive youth development, the transition to adulthood, and mentoring.  Rhodes has published over 200 scholarly papers and several books, most recently Older and Wiser: New Ideas for Youth Mentoring in the 21st Century, which received the 2023 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award from the American Psychological Association. She is co-author of the third and fourth editions of the Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring, the field’s most widely adopted set of evidence-based standards for mentoring program design and implementation. Her op-eds and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, JAMA, and other major outlets, bringing research on youth mentoring to broad public audiences.

Rhodes’s research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, as well as the Spencer Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Axim Collaborative, and numerous other philanthropic organizations. She currently serves on the national research advisory boards of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and Friends of the Children and the national board of directors of Step Up Women’s Network.

Rhodes is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and a former Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow. She is both a Distinguished Fellow and a Faculty Scholar of the William T. Grant Foundation. In 2024, she received two American Psychological Association lifetime achievement awards, the Distinguished Contribution to Theory and Research in Community Psychology Award and the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society.