PhD News

Read the ENGAGE team’s case study on Charles E. Williams II, PhD student and pastor at the Historic King Solomon Baptist Church.

Joyce Lee, Joint Doctoral Program in Social Work and Psychology, has successfully defended her dissertation entitled “Family Processes Underlying Economic Insecurity, Father Involvement, and Child Outcomes in Families with Low Income.” Her committee consisted of Shawna Lee, Brenda Volling (co-chairs), Robert Ortega, Andrew Grogan-Kaylor and Sheryl Olson. Lee has accepted a position as assistant professor at The Ohio State University.

Assistant Professor Fernanda Cross will receive an Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the 2021 Society for Research on Child Development. Cross’ dissertation examines how the roles of sociocultural stressors, such as discrimination and documentation​ status, influence parental ethnic-racial socialization practices in Latinx​ immigrant families. Selection for the awards is based on criteria that included the quality of the dissertation, publications emerging from the project, and the nominee’s current position and engagement in the field of child development research.

Kaitlin Paxton Ward, Joint PhD Program in Social Work and Developmental Psychology student, will intern at Google this summer as a People Analytics Researcher in the People Innovations Lab. Ward will research how parents who are Google employees adjusted during COVID-19, and will explore how to improve work conditions/policies for parents.

Associate Professor Karen Staller, Joint PhD Social Work and Sociology Student Briana Starks and Visiting Scholar Håvard Aaslund co-edited the recent special double issue of Qualitative Social Work: Research and Practice, “Reflections on a Pandemic: Disruptions, Distractions, and Discoveries.” The double issue contains 86 reflexive essays submitted by authors from 35 different countries (and every continent except Antarctica).

Congratulations to Lisa Larance, Joint Doctoral Program in Social Work and Sociology, for successfully defending her dissertation,”Talking Back to the Web of Power: Women's Legal, Child Protection, and Antiviolence Intervention Entanglement and Resistance.” Her committee consisted of Richard Tolman (co-chair), Elizabeth Armstrong (co-chair), Paige Sweet, Karen Staller and Alexandra Murphy.

The School of Social Work invites grant applications from MSW and PhD students to support individual student projects for anti-racism work, with a specific focus on confronting anti-Blackness, racism against Indigenous peoples and confronting white supremacy. The goal is to inclusively support students working within SSW or in communities seeking to confront racism to the greatest degree possible. 

Required Weekly COVID-19 Testing

All students – including graduate and professional students – who live on or come to campus will be required to be tested weekly through the U-M Community Sampling and Tracking Program starting February 16. Currently, over 10% of all COVID reports of students are graduate students.

Weekly testing will be required for all SSW students (including those who have received the vaccine) who:

PhD student Charles Williams has been appointed chair of the Bipartisan Protect Michigan Commission African American workgroup by Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Housed within the Department of Health and Human Services, the commission will help raise awareness of the safety and effectiveness of an approved COVID-19 vaccine, educate the people of the state, and help protect the health and safety of all Michigan residents.

Associate Professor Terri Friedline and PhD student So’Phelia Morrow call on President Biden to stop the predatory burden of student loan debt in an article in Ms.“To advance his promises of racial and gender justice and to better ensure an inclusive economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic,