School of Social Work News

Associate Professors Luke Shaefer and Trina Shanks, Assistant Professors Kristin Seefeldt and Mat Despard, and LEO Adjunct Lecturer Adrienne Lapidos piloted Summer17, a summer youth employment program in Washtenaw County which pairs county youth ages 16-24 with U-M faculty and staff to help them gain work experience, mentorship and life skills training. The program is part of the University's Poverty Solutions initiative and was featured in The University Record.

Assistant Professor Mat Despard's research project, Mapping Financial Opportunity, was selected to receive a 2017 Association of Public Data Users Data Viz Award in the Researchers and Students category. This was a joint effort of researchers at the U-M, University of Kansas and and New America in Washington, DC.

Director of Joint Doctoral Program and Associate Professor Daphne Watkins, Assistant Professor Jamie Mitchell, and Jaclynn Hawkins (PhD'15) co-authored “Physical and Mental Health Interventions for Black Men in the United States“, one of 8 field scan reports on black men of color literature recently released by Research, Integration, Strategies and Evaluation (RISE) for Boys and Men of Color.

Associate Professor Lydia Li’s research was cited in the HuffPost Lifestyle article, “Older Chinese-Americans Who’ve Faced Bias Are More Likely To Have Suicidal Thoughts”.

Professor Brad Zebrack’s article, “Educational and vocational goal disruption in adolescent and young adult cancer survivors” was published in Psycho-Oncology.

Assistant Professor Jamie Mitchell’s article, “The Paradoxical Impact of Companionship on the Mental Health of Older African American Men” was published in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B.

Professor Lorraine Gutiérrez is the 2017 recipient of the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching and Mentoring in Qualitative Inquiry award from the American Psychological Association.

Director of the Joint Doctoral Program and Associate Professor Daphne Watkins was selected to be a featured speaker at the 2017 Institute Science Symposium at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on the theme of epidemics. The Symposium is scheduled for October 27, 2017 at 9 AM. The school will livestream the event and create a video link for later viewing.