The Life Paths Research Center
A research institute devoted to promoting resilience and social justice through individual, family, and community strengths, especially in Appalachia and other rural and marginalized communities. Life Paths is also the home of ResilienceCon.
Read about our 2024 research study,
Strengths Associated with Resilience
ResilienceCon
ResilienceCon™ is a new approach to conferences that offers a variety of traditional and innovative formats. ResilienceCon is an international conference that offers opportunities to interact with colleagues who are interested in strengths-based approaches to understanding, preventing, and responding to violence and other adversities.
The Life Paths Center Community
At The Life Paths Research Center, we are committed to community and work to create spaces for scholars and advocates to gather and work toward our joint mission of reducing the burden of trauma. To that end, we have several ongoing opportunities for engagement, sharing, and communication.
Books
Strengths-Based Prevention provides practitioners and researchers with the means to make more impactful choices in the design and implementation of prevention programs. Drawing from state-of-the-art research on a range of behavior problems such as violence, drug abuse, suicide, and risky sexual activity, Victoria Banyard and Sherry Hamby present a strengths-based approach to prevention.
Sherry Hamby
As someone who grew up in a home with alcoholic and depressed parents as well as a highly cited psychologist and scientist, Sherry Hamby, Ph.D., knows resilience inside and out.
Dr. Hamby is a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at the University of the South in Tennessee and director of the Life Paths Research Center. She is also Founder and Co-chair of ResilienceCon. Dr. Hamby is an internationally recognized authority on trauma and resilience. A clinical psychologist by training, Dr. Hamby has worked for more than 30 years on the problem of violence, including front-line crisis intervention and treatment, involvement in grassroots organizations, and research leading to the publication of more than 200 articles and books. An influential researcher, she has been ranked in the top 1% among more than 10 million researchers in 22 disciplines based on citations to her work. Dr. Hamby’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Huffington Post, CBS News, Psychology Today, and hundreds of other media outlets. Her awards include Outstanding Contributions to the Science of Trauma Psychology from the Division of Trauma Psychology, American Psychological Association and the Christine Blasey Ford Woman of Courage Award from the Association for Women in Psychology. Check out her TEDx talk, Trauma Is Everywhere But So Is Resilience.
She lives on the Cumberland Plateau, in a rural community on the southernmost end of the Appalachian range, with her husband. They have two grown children. When she’s not working, she enjoys walking her two rescue dogs, renovating her mid-century house, and gardening.
Her next book, Stronger Than You Think: The Science of Building Unshakeable Resilience, is forthcoming from Penguin Life in Spring 2026.
Dr. Sherry Hamby has been featured in:
