Welcome to the Center for Interconnected Behavioral and Mental Health Systems (CIBMHS), the College of Education’s only research-designated and Board of Trustees-approved Center. Our Center was founded in 2020 by Drs. Sara McDaniel and Daniel Cohen, but its history goes back more than a decade. CIBMHS started as the Alabama Positive Behavior Support Office (APBSO). The APBSO serves as the statewide technical assistance (TA) provider for PBIS/MTSS/PBS training in Alabama and has since 2012.

Across more than a decade we have had the honor of supporting more than 250 Alabama schools. Some of these schools and their districts benefited from partnerships with APBSO for grant writing to secure federal funding for their TA. While CIBMHS still provides TA to Alabama schools and districts across PBIS/MTSS/PBS and integrating critical supports such as suicide prevention, school-based mental health, restorative practices, bullying prevention, and substance misuse prevention, the Center heavily focuses on reseach, and federally funded research in particular. Currently CIBMHS is involved with four National Institutes for Health research grants and one Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) grants. In total, CIBMHS has been sucessfull in securing more than $7 million in federal funds.

Explore our website to learn more about the CIBMHS team, our current and past research, free resources, and how to become involved in our research that centers students, families and educators in an effort to provide necessary and contextually relevant supports to all students and educators to improve outcomes during and after the K-12 timespan. Please feel free to reach out with any questions, and thank you for what you do to improve the lives our our students and their families!

Sara McDaniel, Ph.D.
Director, CIBMHS
​Professor, University of Alabama
scmcdaniel@ua.edu