Faculty

Rebeccah Sokol, PhD, is a behavioral scientist who studies youth trauma exposure. Her overarching research agenda seeks to ease the burden of adversity experienced in childhood and adolescence, with a central focus on reducing youth violence exposure and involvement. Sokol uses a developmental lens, public health framework, quasi-experimental methods and data science techniques to inform strategies that prevent youth trauma.

Karen Staller, PhD, JD, received her educational training at Cornell Law School and Columbia University School of Social Work, where her dissertation on runaway and homeless youth was awarded with distinction. Staller practiced public interest law with low-income senior citizens and at-risk adolescents in New York City. Her scholarship focuses primarily on runaway and homeless youth (and other at-risk adolescents). She is interested in the complicated interplay between social problem construction, social service delivery, and social policy.

Interpersonal trauma exposure such as intimate partner violence (IPV) is a pervasive problem associated with severe, long-term physical and mental health problems. Yet, current treatments for those who have experienced IPV show limited effectiveness in reducing future IPV victimization, suggesting the mechanisms of risk for experiencing IPV remain largely unknown.

Dr. Sung's primary research interests focus on the role of biopsychosocial factors and community-based interventions in improving school-to-work transition outcomes, career development and psychosocial adjustment for individuals with disabilities. She has authored over 100 publications in the areas of disability justice and rehabilitation, and has received multiple research awards.

Couper Tanko, MSW '23, (she/her/hers) is the School of Social Work’s Undergraduate Program Coordinator. As an MSW student, she pursued the Interpersonal Practice in Integrated Health, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse pathway. She has spent the past few years in Ann Arbor and completed her undergraduate degree at U-M in LSA’s sociology department.

Robert Joseph Taylor is the Harold R. Johnson Endowed Professor of Social Work and the Sheila Feld Collegiate Professor of Social Work. He is also the Director of the Program for Research on Black Americans at the Institute for Social Research. Professor Taylor has published extensively on the informal social support networks (i.e., family, friends, and church members) of adult and elderly Black Americans. An article by Thyer in Journal of Social Service Research finds that Robert Joseph Taylor is the #15 most influential social work faculty (out of 2204 faculty) based on H-index.

Richard M. Tolman, LMSW, PhD, is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. He received his doctorate in social welfare from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his MSW from the University of Michigan. Professor Tolman's work focuses on the effectiveness of interventions designed to change violent and abusive behavior, and the impact of violence on the physical, psychological and economic well-being of victims He began his work in this area as a practitioner working with men who batter in 1980.

Dr. Jennifer Towns (MSW ’05) has over 15 years working in the social work field, providing clinical treatment in a variety of settings including hospitals, community mental health departments and private practice. Her clinical work is founded upon a holistic approach and person-centered principles.

John Tropman is the director of Leadership in Community Benefit Organizations, a program initiated in the School of Social Work January 1, 2015 to organize and focus management content for management majors and Community Organization and Policy & Evaluation majors. His research focuses on the organizational elements that create high-performing human service (and other) organizations. Topics of special interest are entrepreneurship, effective group decision making, C-level executives, the problem of executive burnout and flameout, and organizational rewards systems.

Professor David Tucker's scholarly areas of interest include the formation, growth, and death of organizations; the structural analysis of inter-organizational service delivery systems; and the application of macro organizational theory to the analysis of selected social policy issues. His recent work also focuses on questions about the production and validation of knowledge. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1990, Tucker served on the faculty at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.