School of Social Work News

Professor Rogério M. Pinto has been named a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor.

Sponsored by the Office of the Provost, and jointly administered by the U-M National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID) and the Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (ODEI), the Diversity and Social Transformation Professorship is an honor designation for senior faculty who have the highest levels of achievement in demonstrating a commitment to the university’s ideals of diversity, equity and inclusion through their scholarship, teaching or service and engagement. The initial appointment is for five years and also includes special faculty fellow status at NCID.

Pinto’s research focuses on finding academic, sociopolitical and cultural venues for broadcasting voices of oppressed individuals and groups. Funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, his community-engaged research focuses on the impact of interprofessional collaboration on the delivery of evidence-based services (HIV and drug-use prevention and care) to marginalized racial/ethnic and sexual minorities in the United States and Brazil. Pinto also conducts art-based scholarly research.

"With this professorship, I will advance my federally-funded research on the impact of critical consciousness to abate racism, homophobia, sexism and other forms of oppression. I will specifically investigate performance and visual arts as vehicles for self-healing and social action against oppression of minoritized people," said Pinto.

Pinto is the Berit Ingersoll-Dayton Collegiate Professor of Social Work and the School’s Associate Dean for Research and Innovation.  He is also a Professor of Theatre and Drama at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance. He was the recipient of the U-M Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award in 2021.

Welcome, Dr. Santa J. Ono, named by the Board of Regents as 15th President-Elect of the University of Michigan. “I fiercely believe that higher education — through our scholarship, our service, and our graduates — can deliver the changes we need to build healthy, sustainable, and just communities,” he said.

Professor Brian Perron has been invited to speak with members of the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee regarding his investigation of a Russian academic paper mill. Such entities provide fraudulent services – ghostwriting, brokering authorship on accepted papers, and falsifying data–to researchers seeking to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals. Perron has identified approximately 200 papers in the published literature that have evidence of being brokered through this paper mill. His investigation led to the retraction of 30 published articles from the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, representing the largest number of retractions from a single social science journal.

“I have seen the nature of scientific publishing change so much, “Perron says. “It used to be, you identified the right journals and you knew you were competing with the best work.” Then Perron saw a blog post about people selling scholarly articles. “You find these articles in the published literature,” he says. “Some are brokered through open access journals, and there's the pay-to-publish model; with a few thousand dollars, you get any paper published you want.

“We should have stronger restrictions if somebody's getting federal funding,” he says. “There is a push to make research more widely available, and open access journals were going to solve that. We want government funded science to be more accessible, but we want to weed out the profiteers.”

“It’s exciting that lawmakers are interested in this topic,” Perron says. “You might call what I’m doing ‘citizen science.’ What I dig up is not peer reviewed. It is more like investigative journalism, like doing citizenship and science together.”

PhD student Valerie Taing has been awarded a 2022-2023 Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship. The Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards granted by the Rackham Graduate School. Doctoral candidates who expect to graduate within six years after beginning their degrees are eligible to apply, and the strength and quality of their dissertation abstract, publications and presentations, and recommendations are all taken into consideration when granting this award.

Sam Gilliam, the abstract artist whose work “The Real Blue” was commissioned for the School of Social Work died on Saturday at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 88. “The Real Blue” is the centerpiece of the School’s original art collection.

“Sam Gilliam brought his dynamic use of structures and brilliant deployment of colors to the “The Real Blue,” said Dean Emerita Paula Allen-Meares. This commissioned work of art anchors the collection of artistic works at the School of Social Work. He contextualized this work within the spirit of social justice and the vibrant tapestry of the America we are becoming. His presence lives on in this stunning piece that will continue to influence our social work community.”

Professor Larry Gant sees in the piece the current issues of social work: identities, configurations and critical intersectionality.  “Nothing fits, but it does. The colors are different but they fit; the shapes fit but they aren’t supposed to.  What do we take from that?  It’s abstract art that doesn’t have answers but compels questions and gets your attention, and that’s a really good intent: it gets students able to sit with ambiguity.”

On July 1, 2022, Kathryn Elizabeth (Beth) Angell was appointed as dean of the School of Social Work. She was previously dean of the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) School of Social Work and, before that, held a number of leadership roles at Rutgers University in New Jersey. We caught up with Angell as she prepared to move to Ann Arbor, to learn more about her experiences, perspectives and hopes for the future.

Garrett Pace, Joint Doctoral Program in Social Work and Sociology, has successfully defended his dissertation entitled "Corporal Punishment Bans in Global Perspective: Conceptualization and Child- and Caregiver-Reported Outcomes.” His committee consisted of Shawna Lee and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor. Pace has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Assistant Dean of Field Education Dan Fischer’s Interprofessional Education (IPE) team has won a 2022 bronze award from 1EdTech for their collaboration with U-M Informational & Technology Services.  Their project, Competency-Based Tracking for Interprofessional Education Leveraging Institutional Data, will leverage data to track competencies across U-M’s approximately 35 IPE offerings, which involve 5,000 students from 10 schools across 3 campuses. The team is in the final stages of preparing this project for launch and utilization on the U-M campuses.