Faculty Profile
Johanna Bishop
Director, Behavioral Science Programs
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
(302) 356-6759
Associate Professor
EdD, The George Washington University
M.Ed., Wilmington University
M.S., Wilmington College
B.A., Central Michigan University
A.A., Grand Rapids Community College
Biography
Dr. Johanna Bishop is Director of Behavioral Science Programs at Wilmington University. Her early career years were spent teaching high school speech, drama, and English in Michigan where she directed and produced plays and organized a traveling children’s theatre group with her dedicated high school students before taking a hiatus to raise a family.
She later worked in business and industry providing leadership, language, and inter-cultural communications training. While at Salem Community College, she worked to establish voluntary industry skills standards for chemical training operators in conjunction with local chemical, petro-chemical, and pharmaceutical industries.
Prior to coming to Wilmington University, she worked in the nuclear power industry training the trainers and conducting leadership and human performance improvement training. She earned her OSHA safety training credentials, and worked safety compliance during outages and participated in the first force-on-force NRC mandated graded training exercises after 9/11.
At Wilmington University, Dr. Bishop manages the undergraduate Behavioral Science program, the graduate Human Services program, and several undergraduate and graduate certificate programs.
She is the founding Delaware BETA Chapter Advisor and Delaware Governor of the Pi Gamma Mu Chapter at Wilmington University, known for its members’ contributions to community service. Since 2010 (with the pandemic exception of 2021), Dr. Bishop has been an active participant in the annual Polar Bear Plunge in Rehoboth Beach, and has rallied the support of Wilmu’s Pi Gamma Mu members to join in raising funds to benefit Special Olympics and join in the plunge fun.
In 2016, she founded the annual Human Trafficking Symposium and now organizes the monthly human trafficking webinars available free to the public and professionals.
She earned her doctorate in Human Resource Development/ Human & Organizational Learning at The George Washington University. Her dissertation research was a study of organizational memory of mishaps in the nuclear power industry, based on Durkheim’s sociological concepts of collective memory and Zerubavel’s theories of social cognition and memory of time situated within a high reliability organizing framework.
She also holds a Master of Science in Education, and a Master of Science in Human Resource Management, from Wilmington College. She is currently working on earning a degree in the Administration of Criminal Justice with a concentration in Criminal Behavior and a focus on Human Trafficking. Her undergraduate degree is from Central Michigan University.
Dr. Bishop has served on the Governor’s International Trade Council- International Academic Affairs Committee under the Carper administration where she advocated for foreign language education in Delaware public schools. Her background as an immigrant, coupled with the globalization trend in the world, ignited her determination to help school systems understand the importance of foreign language education in preparing future global citizens.
She is a lifetime member of the International Sociological Association and the Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology. She has presented numerous sessions about human trafficking at national conferences, and has served on the Board of the Association for Applied & Clinical Sociology. She currently serves on the editorial review board of the Journal of Applied Social Science.
Dr. Bishop also performs community service by functioning as New Castle County Ethics Commissioner. Her term expires April 14, 2023.
Teaching, learning, and students are the energizing forces in Dr. Bishop’s existence, and her aim is to help students achieve educational success.