Noor Toraif (PhD’23) Joins BUSSW as Assistant Professor of Macro Practice
Boston University School of Social Work (BUSSW) is excited to announce that Dr. Noor Toraif, a 2023 PhD program alum, will rejoin BUSSW on July 1, 2025 as an assistant professor of macro practice. She returns to BUSSW from the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice where she has served as an assistant professor since 2023.
Dr. Toraif is a mixed methods and community-engaged researcher whose work brings to light young people’s experiences at the intersection of the United States’ child welfare, juvenile, and criminal legal systems. Her work examines the causes and consequences of carceral contact, the roles institutions play in perpetuating or preventing youth criminalization, and strategies for disrupting youth criminalization.
Dr. Toraif currently serves as principal investigator on a study examining the role of public defender teams in supporting system-impacted emerging adults and preventing incarceration; a co-investigator on a study investigating the contributions of holistic defense teams; and a co-investigator on an LA County-based study examining the impact of guaranteed income and economic and social support for youth aging out of the Los Angeles foster care system.
Her broader research agenda examines points of crossover from the child welfare system to the juvenile legal system; conditions of youth criminalization in legal and social service settings; the longitudinal outcomes associated with youths’ criminal legal involvement; the impacts of restorative-justice based youth diversion; and participatory methodologies that engage youth as co-producers of knowledge.
Dr. Toraif’s research is published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including PLoS one, the American Journal of Community Psychology, the Journal of Adolescent Research, Sociological Inquiry, Child Welfare, and Research on Social Work Practice. Her writing on anti-carceral and abolitionist social work appears in the Oxford Handbook of Social Work and in the influential edited volume Social Work, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice: Reckoning with Our History, Interrogating our Present, Re-Imagining our Future (Oxford University Press).
At Penn, Dr. Toraif was honored with the 2024 Excellence in Teaching Award, the highest teaching recognition at the School of Social Policy and Practice.
Dr. Toraif is a 2022-2023 Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellow and a 2022 recipient of the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) Doctoral Fellows Award, prestigious honors she received in support of her dissertation: “In-Routes and ‘On the Outs’: Dually-Involved Black and Latino Youth and Young Adults’ Transition Experiences from the Child Welfare System to the Juvenile Justice System and During Reentry.”
During her time in BUSSW’s doctoral program, Dr. Toraif received an Early-Stage Urban Research Award from BU Initiative on Cities, a 2021 Graduate Fellowship at the BU Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and a 2020 Rappaport Public Policy Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Dr. Toraif earned her MA in Child Study and Human Development in 2018 at Tufts University, where she received the Child Development Graduate Scholarship and Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Engagement Scholar Fellowship. She earned BA degrees in both Neuroscience and Psychology and Philosophy at Boston University, along with multiple Undergraduate Research Opportunity awards, a BU Fitzgerald Translation Award in 2015, and a Karbank Philosophy Fellowship from BU School of Arts and Sciences.