Social Welfare Analysis Colloquium
Speaker Bios- Fall 2009
Antoinette Basualdo-Delmonico
Antoinette Basualdo-Delmonico is a doctoral candidate in the interdisciplinary program in social work and sociology. Her dissertation research is focused on understanding the role that parents play in youth mentoring relationships, from the perspective of parents, volunteer mentors, and agency workers who support mentoring matches. She is the Project Coordinator of the Understanding the Mentoring Process study, under the direction of Professor Renée Spencer, and she has extensive experience working in community based organizations that primarily serve Latino and immigrant populations.
Marah A. Curtis
Assistant Professor of Social Welfare Policy, School of Social Work, Boston University
Marah A. Curtis is an Assistant Professor of Social Welfare Policy at the Boston University School of Social Work and a Peter Paul Career Development Professor. Dr. Curtis received her Ph.D. in Social Policy, Planning and Policy Analysis at Columbia University School of Social Work in 2005 and was both a Council on Social Work Education and Columbia University Public Policy Consortium Fellow. Her research focuses on the effects of public policy on the well being of families with particular emphasis on housing policy and incarceration. This work seeks to untangle the impact of various public benefits and contextual factors on the lives of vulnerable families. Recent publications include: Explaining variation in fertility timing: evidence from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Population Research and Policy Review, (with Jane Waldfogel, In Press), Subsidized housing, housing prices and the living arrangements of unmarried mothers. Housing Policy Debate, (2007, 18(1): 145-170). Current work focuses on an understudied component of vulnerable families, fathers. Dr. Curtis is examining the impact of the One Strike Policy in public and subsidized housing, housing stability among fathers as well as the effect of incarceration on fathers' long-term health and housing security.
Diane Gout
Diane Gout is currently a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Sociology and Social Work Program. Her research is focused on understanding historical trauma and other factors associated with the disproportionately high rates of intimate partner violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women. She has worked with this population for over eight years. Diane Gout is also employed as a Senior Research Associate with the Justice Policy Program at the Muskie School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine. She has worked in the field of violence against women for more than 20 years. She has experience in trauma-based practice and has worked with survivors of rape, incest, and domestic violence. In addition to direct practice intervention, Ms. Gout has worked with multi-disciplinary teams to develop policies and protocols, evaluate systems, and conduct research on issues of trauma and abuse. Currently, Diane works with the VAWA Measuring Effectiveness Initiative, a national project that has worked collaboratively to develop measures of effectiveness and data collection instruments for agencies and organizations funded by the Office on Violence Against Women in the U.S. Department of Justice.
Justin Hollander
Assistant Professor, Tufts University, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning
Justin Hollander is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. His research and teaching is in the area of land use and urban redevelopment, with a focus on the changing physical form of cities in post-industrial North America. His first book Polluted and Dangerous: America's Worst Abandoned Properties and What Can Be Done About Them was published in 2009 by the University of Vermont Press. Dr. Hollander's research has been funded by a number of sources, including the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Urban Land Institute, the Government of Canada, and the Genessee Institute. During the 2009-2010 academic year, he is on sabbatical from Tufts and is serving as a Research Fellow at the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University.
Renee M. Johnson
Assistant Professor, Boston University School of Public Health, Dept. of Community Health Sciences
Renee M. Johnson is an Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. Dr. Johnson received her Ph.D. (2004) and MPH (1998) in Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. Her research focuses on violence and substance use among adolescents; suicide prevention; and firearm injury. Dr. Johnson is an investigator with the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center, which comprises the “Boston Youth Survey (BYS)”, a biennial survey of a random sample of high school students in Boston Public Schools. Although the BYS examines a host of factors relevant to adolescent well-being, including school performance, involvement in extracurricular activities, and health behaviors, the main emphasis is on violence. The Survey asks youth about experienced or perpetrated assault and/or witnessed violence, gun availability, weapon-carrying, and gang activity. Dr. Johnson was recently awarded a 2-year grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to use BYS data to examine bullying and physical victimization among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents. Recent publications include: (1) Emotional distress among sexual minority youth: the mediating role of maltreatment from peers. Journal of Youth and Adolescence (200938:1001-1014), (2) Lethal means reduction: What have we learned? Current Opinion in Pediatrics (forthcoming, pre-prints are available on the Web site), (3) Association between neighborhood safety and overweight status among urban adolescents. BMC Public Health (forthcoming, pre-prints are available on the Web site), and (4) Creating a youth violence data system for Boston, Massachusetts. Australia and New Zealand Journal of Criminology (In Press).
Terrence Lewis
Terrence Lewis is a doctoral student in the interdisciplinary program in social work and sociology at the Boston University School of Social Work. He obtained a B.A.S.W. from The Catholic University of America’s National Catholic School of Social Services and a MSW in 1998 at the University of Kentucky’s Advanced Standing Program. He has many years of direct practice experience, including crisis counseling in psychiatric, family preservation, community mental health, and private practice settings. His dissertation research will focus on the LGBT affirmative ministries offered by African American Ministers in Historically Black Congregations. During his doctoral studies, he has participated as a research assistant and a project coordinator in major research projects, taught as an adjunct lecturer in the MSW program, and co-authored papers with Professors Renée Spencer and Mark Gianino.
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Brett Litz
Professor, Boston University School of Medicine, Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry
Dr. Brett Litz is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine. He has devoted his career to evaluating the mental health outcomes associated with military deployments across the lifespan, the assessment and treatment of PTSD using Telehealth and Internet-based approaches, with an emphasis on early intervention for combat and operational trauma and loss. Dr. Litz’s recent work entails evaluations of the psychological and social impact of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars chiefly among active-duty military personnel as well the development and testing of novel primary prevention, pre-clinical, and clinical intervention strategies for service members. He is internationally recognized as an expert on military trauma and early intervention for trauma and traumatic loss. In addition to serving as PI and co-PI on various research funded research projects, Dr. Litz is actively involved in training clinical psychologists and post-doctoral fellows. He has over 150 publications and has authored two books, one on early intervention for trauma and the other about psychological resilience. Dr. Litz is a fellow in the American Psychopathological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, and he is a member of the Psychological Subcommittee of the Defense Health Board. He has also been a member of various special committees sponsored by the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and the National Institute of Mental Health.
Ruth Paris
Assistant Professor, Boston University, SSW
Dr. Ruth Paris is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Practice at BUSSW, where she also serves as the director of the Family Therapy Certificate Program. She has a program of research focused on family interventions and family processes. Through a series of funded multi-year research projects, Dr. Paris has evaluated and developed family-based interventions directed at the following issues: (1) isolated first time mothers in a home visiting program; (2) immigrant/refugee mothers receiving home-based services from bilingual/bicultural paraprofessionals; (3) mothers with postpartum depression and their infants in a dyadic home-based clinical treatment program; and (4) military service members with children under 5 years of age returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. The majority of these projects had a focus on diverse populations. She has served as a consultant on 2 federally funded projects with teams at Harvard School of Public Health focused on intimate partner violence and is currently an advisor on a K01 award recently funded by the NIH focused on beliefs and attitudes regarding corporal punishment in African American and Caucasian urban communities. Dr. Paris practiced clinical social work extensively with families in a variety of settings including Massachusetts General Hospital, Kaiser Permanente, and community mental health.
Enrique Silva
Assistant Professor of Urban Affairs and City Planning, Department of Applied Social Sciences
BA, Columbia University; MScPl, University of Toronto; PhD, University of California, Berkeley.
An expert in comparative urbanization and the formation of public sector planning institutions and practices, Dr. Silva's research into the institutionalization of participatory planning policies in Chile and the U.S. raises questions about the challenges inherent in the democratization of planning and policy-making in general. Silva teaches courses on the theory and history of city planning, comparative urbanization, politics and public participation, and qualitative research methods. He has worked abroad in the fields of international development, philanthropy, and human rights, and has several years of professional experience as a city planner and environmental permitting consultant in the Greater Boston area.
Emilia Simeonova
Assistant Professor, Tufts University, Economics
Emilia Simeonova is an assistant professor in economics at Tufts University. Her interests are in the economics of health and health care.
She received her PhD in economics from Columbia University in 2008, and spent a year as an assistant professor at the Institute for International Economics Studies in Stockholm, Sweden. Some of the issues she has studied include the causes of racial disparities in mortality among blacks and whites, the effect of marriage on health care utilization and health behaviors, and hospital responses to charity care requirements and their consequences for infant and maternal health. She has a strong interest in the interaction between environmental changes induced by global warming and health outcomes. Currently, she is preparing an experiment in patient adherence to medication using a population of indigent Medicaid recipients in New York City.
Renée Spencer
Associate Professor, Boston University School of Social Work
Renée Spencer is an Associate Professor at the Boston University School of Social Work. She received her Ed.D. in human development and psychology from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and M.S.S.W. from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research has focused primarily on youth mentoring and the role that strong relationships with adults play in the psychosocial development of adolescents. For her William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award, she is currently carrying out a mixed-methods longitudinal study of youth mentoring relationships in both community and school-based programs. She has published a number of articles and book chapters on youth mentoring. Recent publications include ’It’s not what I expected’: A qualitative study of youth mentoring relationship failures” published in the Journal of Adolescent Research (2007) and “Understanding the mentoring process between adolescents and adults” published in Youth and Society (2006). Professor Spencer has served as a qualitative methods consultant on several research projects and teaches a doctoral seminar in qualitative research methods. She currently serves as a member of the Research and Policy Council of MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership and of the Mass Mentoring Partnership Quality Based Membership Self-Assessment Review Advisory Group.
Nancy E. Suchman
Associate Professor of Psychiatry (Psychology) and Yale Child Study Center
