Sharon Cooper
Board member

Sharon Cooper, MD is the CEO of Developmental and Forensic Pediatrics, P.A., a consulting firm which provides medical care, research, training and expert witness experience in child maltreatment cases as well as medical care for children with disabilities. She works regularly with numerous national and international investigative agencies on Internet-facilitated crimes against children cases.

Dr. Cooper spent 21 years in the Armed Forces, retiring as a colonel, and has for the past several years, worked in both the civilian and military arenas in child abuse and developmental pediatrics. She holds a faculty position at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Medicine and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. She is an instructor at the Army Medical Education Department Center and School at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas where she provides multidisciplinary training in all forms of child maltreatment to health care providers, law enforcement, attorneys, judges, therapists, chaplains, and social workers.

For the past several years, Dr. Cooper has served as a consultant to and a Board member of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children where she teaches about the victim aspects of Internet crimes against children and commercial sexual exploitation of children and youth. She has also provided numerous international training for the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Jordan, Russia, France, Germany, Turkey and other countries. Dr. Cooper has lectured both nationally and internationally in well over 300 conferences for the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, the North Carolina District Attorney’s Association, several attorney general’s conferences in various states, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Interpol, among others. She has published chapters in professional texts, and is the lead author of the first comprehensive textbook on the medical, legal, and social science aspects of child sexual exploitation and Internet-facilitated crimes against children.

Dr. Cooper has provided testimony to the U.S. Congress as well as to the Russian Duma (Parliament), the European Commission, and the Italian Senate. She is also a member of an international Expert Working Group on Children and Young Persons with Abusive and Violent Experiences Connected to Cyberspace hosted by the Council of the Baltic Sea States and the Swedish Children’s Welfare Foundation.

She is a board member of several organizations and is a member of several professional associations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, the International Association of Forensic Nurses, and the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect.

Dr. Cooper was selected by Newsweek magazine as one of the 150 Women Who Shake the World (March 2011). She was also selected by the U.S. Attorney General for membership in the Defending Childhood Task Force: Children Exposed to Violence (2011-2012).