Dr. Janice Johnson Dias holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Temple University with a specialization in urban and political sociology. Her research focuses on impoverished mothers and children, and her work on welfare-to-work organizations has appeared in the top-ranking policy periodical, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. She has also published in well-respected sociological and psychological journals such as Gender and Society and the American Journal of Community Psychology.

Janice specializes in building coalitions dedicated to sustainable social change. She has extensive experience with a wide array of human services agencies, private and public, including educational, employment, and health institutions across the United States.   She has worked with community-based organizations in Memphis, Tennessee, and Long Island, New York, to design and conduct training programs to facilitate dialogue and solution building across multiple constituencies. Her studies on black girls’ mental, sexual, and physical health issues earned her a special Congressional honor.

Born in the parish of St. Ann and raised in St. Mary in Jamaica, Janice moved with her mother and three older brothers to Boston when she was twelve years old. She earned her bachelors from Brandeis University, where she served as president of the Black Student Union and traveled to Grenada to study the local consequences of the 1983 U.S. invasion.

After graduating from Brandeis, Janice taught English literature for two years at the St. George’s School, a high school in Newport, Rhode Island. She later enrolled in a Master’s program at Temple University to study sociology, with an emphasis on U.S.-Caribbean relations.
Janice returned to Temple to pursue her Ph.D. subsequently joined the faculty at John Jay College in New York City.  She serves as one of Mayor Ras J. Baraka, Mayor of Newark advisors on violence as a public health issue.  Now a tenured associate professor of sociology at John Jay, She is also president of the GrassROOTS Community Foundation, a New Jersey-based training institution with a focus on public health and social action that she co-founded in 2011. Janice currently lives in West Orange, NJ, with her husband, Scott and their daughter Marley. In 2020, she will publish her first book with Random House, Parent Like It Matters: How to Raise Joyful-Change making Girls. It summarize her life experiences and offer practical tips of how caregivers can raise children who are devoted to social justice.