PhD News

Laura Yakas successfully defended her dissertation "Love in a Time of Madness: The Importance of Purpose and Belonging in Healing and Harnessing Madness". Her committee consisted of Karen Staller, Damani Partridge (co-chairs), Richard Tolman and Holly Peters-Golden. Yakas has accepted a summer position at a Global Leadership Forum for high school students.

Kathryn Berringer, Alex Lu (MSW student) and Joyce Y. Lee received the Doctoral Poster Awards at the School of Social Work's Social Justice in Social Work Research Symposium. Berringer was awarded for her poster, "Examining Drivers of Health Inequities in HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) Implementation in the US". Lu and Lee for their poster "Spank, Smack, & Whoop”: Stay-At-Home Parents’ Spanking Tweets".

Joyce Lee, PhD student, was accepted as a student editorial board member for the journal Child Maltreatment for 2018-2019.

Director of Joint PhD Program and Associate Professor Daphne Watkins is one of five social work scholars selected to be featured at the Society for Social Work and Research's (SSWR) Brief and Brilliant TEDx-style session in January. This year’s conference theme is "Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity and Justice". Related to this theme, each speaker will be asked to complete the statement “I dream a world….”.

Garrett Pace’s (PhD student) book chapter, “Using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) in Life Course Health Development Research“ was published in the “Handbook of Life Course Health Development”.

Director of Joint PhD Program and Associate Professor Daphne Watkins was cited in the NBC News article, “Hip-hop works to break down mental health stigma for black men.”

Lisa Larance’s (PhD student) article, “Strategically Stealthy: Women’s Agency in Navigating Spousal Violence” was published in the Journal of Women and Social Work.

Angie Perone’s (PhD student) op-ed, “Navigating Nursing Home Violations, Dwindling Protections, and Potential Solutions for LGBT Older Adults” was published in PrideSource.

Peter Felsman (PhD student) and Associate Dean for Research and Professor Joe Himle received a grant from The Detroit Creativity Project for "The Improv Project" which is a Detroit school-based program that teaches life skills to adolescents through improvisational theater. The program has been found to predict increases in social skills and reductions in social phobia, through survey outcome data.

Joyce Lee (PhD student) and Associate Professor Andy Grogan-Kaylor received a grant from Rackham Graduate School for #Parenting, which is an interdisciplinary workshop that provides a forum for faculty and graduate students to address issues related to parenting research.