William D. Weisberg, Ph.D.

Dr. William Weisberg has worked in the fields of youth services and conflict resolution for more than 20 years. He was appointed Chief Operating Officer of The Children’s Aid Society in January 2008.

As Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Dr. Weisberg oversees the agency’s extensive services. He has worked with the foster care division to create a state-of-the-art service center for disconnected youth in the Bronx; with the health services division to consolidate and upgrade the agency’s mental health services; with the community centers to develop innovative programming for academic enrichment and the African American Male Initiative; with the community schools to navigate through recent school reforms (helping Children’s Aid’s community schools outperform other public schools in student academic progress and school environment in school evaluations); and with Children’s Aid’s juvenile justice programs, to expand services to 1,300 additional families in crisis in the Bronx. He has also helped to develop two new initiatives to provide direct cash transfers to low-income families.

Since joining Children’s Aid in 1982, he has held the positions of Associate Executive Director; Division Director, City & Country Branches; Administrative Supervisor; Career Readiness Program Director; and Mediation Program Director. In these last two positions, he helped to develop an award-winning teen entrepreneurs program and a model program to divert status offenders, which resulted in statewide juvenile justice reform.

In the field of International Conflict Resolution, Dr. Weisberg was a founding member of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Harvard University Center for International Affairs, and is currently Senior Associate at the Center for International Conflict Resolution at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Dr. Weisberg has been a facilitator of multi-party discussions for conflicts in the Middle East, Sri Lanka, the Haitian Diaspora, the Mohawk Nation, and U.S. inter-religious and race relations. He has provided training in conflict analysis to the Government negotiating team in Sri Lanka, and has lectured on the topic of international conflict resolution at Universities in Germany, Greece and Sri Lanka, as well as at Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Arts and Sciences. His manuscripts on ethnic relations appear in three books.

Dr. Weisberg holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Social Psychology from Harvard University and a B.A. in Psychology from the State University of New York at Binghamton. While at Harvard, he was honored to receive four awards for outstanding undergraduate course instruction, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship Award and an International Dissertation Award for his research on child custody negotiations.