Social Welfare Analysis Colloquium
Speaker Bios - FaLL 2008
Rob Weller
Professor, Department of Anthropology, Boston University
Research Associate, Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs
Robert P. Weller is Professor and Chair of Anthropology and Research Associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University. He taught at Duke University before coming to Boston in 1990. His most recent book is Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford 2008, co-authored with A. Seligman, M. Puett, and B. Simon). Other books include Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan (Cambridge 2006), Alternate Civilities: Chinese Culture and the Prospects for Democracy (Westview 1999), Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen (Macmillan 1994), and Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion (Macmillan 1987). He has also edited a volume called Civil Life, Globalization, and Political Change in Asia: Organizing Between Family and State (Routledge 2005), and co-edited Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China (Hawaii 1996) and Power and Protest in the Countryside (Duke 1982). Weller's present research focuses on the role of religion in creating public social benefits in Chinese communities in China, Malaysia, and Taiwan.
Erin O'Brien
Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Erin E. O’Brien is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Faculty Affiliate in the McCormack Policy School. She is author of The Politics of Identity: Solidarity Building among America’s Working Poor (State University of New York Press, Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram’s public policy series) and co-author of Diversity in Contemporary American Politics and Government (Pearson). Dr. O’Brien’s work also appears in The American Journal of Political Science, Women and Politics, and in numerous book chapters.
Rob Hudson
Professor of Social Welfare Policy, School of Social Work, Boston University
Rob Hudson is Professor and Chair, Dept. of Social Welfare Policy, Boston University School of Social Work. His areas of interest are the politics and policies of aging, the design and implementation of social service policies, and the place of the aged in the contemporary welfare state. His articles have appeared in Social Service Review, International Social Security Review, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Families in Society, among other journals. He currently serves as editor of Public Policy & Aging Report, and he is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, where he chairs the John A. Heinz Dissertation Award Committee. He is currently organizing a two-volume reference set for Praeger, Boomer Bust?: The New Political Economy of Aging. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Maria Green
Assistant Professor, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University
Maria Green is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Programs on Sustainable International Development at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. A lawyer by training, she works on the intersection of international human rights law and development work, focusing in particular on human rights related to basic economic and social goods such as food, health, housing, and education. She has lectured widely on these issues and has been a consultant for the United Nations Development Program and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on poverty and human rights questions, including most recently on the interplay between human rights law and practice and the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. Her writings include "What We Talk About When We Talk About Indicators: Current Approaches to Human Rights Measurement" (Human Rights Quarterly, 2001). She received her J.D. degree from Harvard Law School.
Alexandra Crampton
Postdoctoral Fellow, Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer Range Future & the Institute for Geriatric Social Work, Boston University
Alexandra Crampton received an MSW and a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Michigan. She completed a doctorate in Social Work and Anthropology from the University of Michigan’s Joint Program in Social Work and Social Science in December 2007. She has worked in the field of alternative dispute resolution for several years, and continues work with the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School as a postdoctoral researcher. She has presented her research for the American Anthropological Association, the Gerontological Society of America, the Council on Social Work Education, and the Society for Social Work Research. Her research examines the meanings and outcomes of domestic and international interventions used to help vulnerable populations. Current work includes global aging and the ethics, politics, and social practices of “doing good” through professional and informal interventions
Silvia Domínguez
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Human Services, Northeastern University, Boston
Silvia Dominguez is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Human Services at Northeastern University. Dr. Domínguez was born in Chile and came to the United States as a political refugee. Her areas of expertise are race relations, immigration, social networks, mental health and violence. Dr. Dominguez’s research has focused on the perceptions of discrimination and the health of African-American veterans, the efficacy of social capital based interventions to reduce health disparities as well as the transnational ties of Latin-American women in public housing and the acculturation of host individuals. She is author of “Social Flow: Immigrants and Social Mobility” a book, as well as an article “Race, Immigration and Cognitive Frames: Integration of Public Housing” both currently under review. Dr. Dominguez’s current work focuses on the lingering effects of trauma on the life chances of three generations as well as the mental health affects of moving from high poverty to low poverty neighborhoods among Moving to Opportunity participants.
Russel Lopez
Assistant Professor, School of Public Health, Boston University
Dr. Russell Lopez is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. He has a Master of City and Regional Planning from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and received his doctorate from Boston University in environmental health. Dr. Lopez's research focuses on how metropolitan, neighborhood and local built and social environments impact health. He has published papers on the health effects of urban sprawl, racial residential segregation and urban sprawl. His neighborhood work includes studies on the association between local features such as access to supermarkets and obesity, the association between neighborhood characteristics and health risk behaviors, and studies on the effects of renovated schoolyards on student test scores. Dr. Lopez is currently working on a book that traces the history of using architecture, urban design and the built environment to improve health and social welfare.
Rogerio Pinto
Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, Columbia University
Dr. Rogério M. Pinto is a Brazilian-American psychiatric social worker with extensive clinical and community work with racial and ethnic minority populations. After receiving his doctoral degree in social work from Columbia University, Dr. Pinto joined a three-year NIMH-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Dr. Pinto specializes in community-based participatory HIV prevention research, and has done most of his teaching and research in the United States and Brazil. In 2007, Dr. Pinto was awarded from NIMH a Mentored Research Development Award (K01) to examine factors that facilitate researchers’ collaborations with HIV service providers, and to develop evidence-based models of collaboration that can be tested and replicated. In addition, Dr. Pinto is conducting several other research projects, both in Brazil and New York, to further study the role of providers in HIV-prevention research and factors that influence a engagement and retention of researchers and their community-based collaborators in health-related research. Dr. Pinto’s research has been funded by NIMH, the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies, the International Association of School of Social Work, and a Columbia University Diversity Initiative Research Fellowship.
Stephanie C. Berzin
Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Social Work, Boston College
Chair, Children, Youth, and Families Concentration
Stephanie C. Berzin is Assistant Professor of Social Work at the Graduate School of Social Work and Chair of the Children, Youth, and Families Concentration at Boston College. Her scholarship centers on a line of inquiry related to how social context impacts youth development. She is interested in examining how the family, school, and neighborhood context impact development for vulnerable youth, with vulnerability broadly defined by exposure to poverty, racism, and classism and/or vulnerability as evidenced by involvement in social service systems including child welfare, mental health, special education, juvenile justice, and/or welfare. Her articles on these topics have appeared in Social Service Review, Children and Youth Services Review, Families in Society, and Child Welfare, among other journals. She is currently involved in two national efforts to understand and improve school based mental health services and a project examining youth transitioning out of the foster care system. Dr. Berzin received her Ph.D. in social work from the University of California, Berkeley and her Master of Science in social work from Columbia University
Sunny Shin
Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, Boston University
Dr. Shin received his master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Social Work and his doctoral degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Social Work. Dr. Shin’s research interests are in the substantive areas of childhood maltreatment, substance abuse, and mental health services research. Recent projects have focused on racial/ethnic disparities in child mental health services use, and childhood maltreatment and adolescent substance abuse.
