Marilyn R. (Lynn) McDonald

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Marilyn R. (Lynn) McDonald is Director and Principal Investigator, Families and Schools Together (FAST) and a senior scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

McDonald directs the national Families and Schools Together (FAST) program, which promotes students' resilience in adversity and reduction of long-term negative outcomes. FAST builds multiple layers of protective factors around at-risk children, including intensive parental involvement. Its research-based activities bring families into the school for weekly meetings.

FAST appears to have dramatically increased parental involvement in children's educational success in 25 states, and across diverse ethnic and socioeconomic groups, although predominantly in low-income families.

McDonald is co-principal Researcher of a $2.9 million National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) five-year grant to study the application of a program she developed, FAST, with ethnically specific groups.

McDonald also directs the FAST program at FAST Intl., Inc. and was a tenure track faculty in Social Work (1975-87) at UW-Madison. She also holds a clinical faculty appointment in the UW-Madison Department of Psychiatry.

McDonald was principal researcher of a five-year $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. Grants from the DeWitt Wallace Reader's Digest Foundation and the Kraft Corporation have helped to disseminate FAST nationally.