• jiw(at)virginia.edu

Janet I. Warren, D.S.W., is Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences and Associate Director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. She is the University of Virginia liaison to the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI and oversees the research collaboration that the Institute maintains with the three profiling units of the FBI offering operational support on cases of terrorism, serial murder, and child abduction and murder. She is an associate of Park Dietz and Associates and a practicing psychoanalyst in Charlottesville, Virginia having completed her psychoanalytic training with the New York Freudian Society in 2001. 

Dr. Warren has received research grants from the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services, and has collaborated for many years with the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI on their research regarding serial rapists, sexual sadists, and serial killers.
She is currently involved in research that has evolved out of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) which is examining risk markers for coerced and forced sex in male and female prisons nationally. She is also completing projects that examine the structure of personality disorders and psychopathy in female inmates, the clinical dynamics of and outcomes with juveniles determined by the court to  be incompetent to stand trial, the relationship of PTSD to trauma exposure, child abduction and murder, female sex offending, and maternal responses to child sexual abuse. In 1992, she began the study that examined violence at the University of Virginia and initiated the research that culminated in the establishment of the Virginia Institute of Justice Information Systems. Dr. Warren has recently completed an edited volume with Special Agent Don Sheehan of the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI on suicide by law enforcement and the phenomenon referred to as "suicide-by-cop."


Dr. Warren is a past president of the National Organization of Forensic Social Work, and was Co-chair of the Forensic Committee of the National Federation of Societies for Clinical Social Work from 1993-96. She is a member of the New York Freudian Society and of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

Dr. Warren's forensic interests include prison liability concerning issues of sexual assault and rape; malpractice of social workers, counselors and therapists on issues of negligent release, failure to warn potential victims of violence, institutional violence and suicide, and boundary violations in counseling relationships; and the handling of threatening communications by universities and large corporations. She often serves as an expert in cases that involve Department of Social Services placement and supervision complaints and the  assessments of child sexual abuse in these contexts. Her criminal involvement generally focuses on cases involving serial sexual crime including sexually sadistic murder and serial rape.

Dr. Warren has completed over 60 capital murder cases nationally using a psychodynamic perspective to develop extensive life narratives that explore the life history and personality dynamics of the defendant as they might inform sentencing decisions.

Dr. Warren obtained her bachelor and master's degrees in social work from the University of Manitoba in Canada and her doctorate in Social Welfare from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Warren can be reached at jiw(at)virginia.edu.