Michael J. Karcher, Ed.D., Ph.D., is a Professor of Educational Psychology in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He holds an Ed.D. in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University (1997) and a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from UT Austin (1999).

He conducts research on school-based and cross-age peer mentoring as well as on adolescent connectedness and pair counseling (see www.michaelkarcher.com). He developed the CAMP peer mentoring program and the Hemingway: Measure of Adolescent Connectedness which is used in the CAMP program. He conducted one of the first large-scale school-based mentoring studies, the Study of Mentoring in the Learning Environment (SMILE, 2003-2007) and currently directs two large-scale studies for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). He co-edited Play, Talk, Learn: Promising Practices in Youth Mentoring (2010) and the Handbook of Youth Mentoring (2005, 2013)