BUSSW Welcomes Four New Professors to its Top-Ranked Faculty
BU School of Social Work (BUSSW) is proud to announce four accomplished faculty have joined the school beginning in summer and fall 2026.
BUSSW Dean Barbara Jones shared, “We are thrilled to welcome these four innovative and inspiring tenure-track assistant professors to our BUSSW community! These scholars bring a wealth of clinical, macro, leadership, research, and teaching experience to our top-ranked school. Their collective and individual commitments to students, community engagement, translational and impactful scholarship, as well as equity and justice, are a perfect fit for our mission to create a more just and compassionate society. We look forward to seeing how our new colleagues will add to our culture and help us “dismantle injustice and liberate possibilities.”
Dr. Ian Johnson
Ian Johnson, PhD, LCSW joins the school’s Clinical Practice Department as a tenure track assistant professor. Most recently, he was a faculty member at the University of Texas at San Antonio College for Health, Community & Policy. Dr. Johnson is a practitioner-activist-scholar with a translational research agenda that aims to improve the lives of older adults experiencing housing precarity. His exploratory applied research supports housing justice in three ways: (1) the development of housing-led and place-based interventions; (2) interprofessional capacity-building; and (3) targeted supports for LGBTQ+ older adults and other minoritized older people at higher risk for displacement. Dr. Johnson earned his MSW from CUNY Hunter and a PhD in Social Welfare from the University of Washington. In addition to his academic work, he has a fifteen-year history as a social work practitioner providing clinical supervision to social workers and recently became an end-of-life doula.
Dr. Barbara Mendez Campos Love
Barbara Mendez Campos Love, PhD, LCSW, joins the school’s Clinical Practice Department as a tenure track assistant professor, after serving on the faculty at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville College of Social Work. She is a clinically and macro-trained independently licensed social worker with a decade of practice experience. As a gerontologist and researcher, her scholarship centers on how dementia caregiving and the structural conditions surrounding care, including economic barriers, employment disruption, organizational literacy, and access to health and support systems, shape health, psychological well-being, and cognitive health across the life course, with a particular focus on Latine and other historically underrepresented communities.
Grounded in community-based practice and clinical leadership in healthcare, mental health, and dementia care settings, Dr. Mendez Campos Love brings a multi-system perspective to aging and caregiving research at the intersection of labor markets, health systems, and social policy. She uses longitudinal, population-based quantitative and mixed-methods approaches to identify community-centered strategies that strengthen caregiver supports, care delivery, and policy responses. She was recently selected as a scholar for the 2026 cohort of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities’ Health Disparities Research Institute. She earned her PhD in Social Work from Boston College and her MSW from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Sarah Elizabeth Neville
Sarah Elizabeth Neville, PhD, joins the school’s Human Behavior, Research, and Policy Department as a tenure track assistant professor after serving as a visiting faculty lecturer at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell in the School of Criminology and Justice Studies. Dr. Neville is a mixed-methods researcher focused on global child welfare, including family strengthening and mental health interventions aimed at helping children reunify with their families after living in institutions and preventing vulnerable children from entering institutions in the first place. She recently completed a NIH T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Brown University School of Public Health and the Brown Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, where she developed a program of research using implementation science to adapt and test an evidence-based intervention for family reunification in Ghana. Dr. Neville is also a certified practitioner of Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) and has worked and conducted research in the United States, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guatemala, Nigeria, and Zambia. She obtained her PhD in Social Work at Boston College and a Master’s Degree in Child Study and Human Development from Tufts University. She is an elected member of the school committee in the city of Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Dr. Lauren Peterson
Lauren Peterson, PhD, joins BUSSW’s Human Behavior, Research, and Policy Department as a tenure track assistant professor after completing her PhD from the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, where she also earned a Master of Social Work-equivalent degree. She also holds a Master of Public Health in Health Policy and Management from Columbia University. Dr. Peterson’s interdisciplinary approach to research, teaching, and service is further grounded by nearly eight years of macro policy experience with organizations such as the International Labour Organization and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. Her current scholarship employs multi-method approaches, combining novel policy data and large-scale administrative data to understand and investigate federal and state policies with the aim of improving health and well-being for marginalized populations, including people with disabilities, substance use disorders, and other complex medical and social needs. Much of her current work centers on Medicaid and safety-net systems, including her dissertation research on the role of state Medicaid waiver policy design in home and community-based services utilization among people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Her work has been supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), The Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and was recently featured in Health Affairs, Psychiatric Services, and The Milbank Quarterly.
Learn more about our BU School of Social Work faculty