Dear Friends and Colleagues,
For over a hundred years, the School of Social Work at the University of Pittsburgh has been a national leader in conducting scholarship grounded in community, challenging oppressive systems, and reimagining practice and policy.
In this publication, I am excited to share an overview of how our faculty have advanced this work in the last year. Across a range o
f practice areas, Pitt’s School of Social Work faculty and doctoral students are conducting critical, rigorous, and boundary-pushing research that seeks to contribute to individual and collective well-being. At the University of Pittsburgh, we understand that this important work cannot be done without centering community voices and addressing racist and oppressive systems that continue to restrict opportunities for some. This is evident throughout our faculty research—be it, Dr. Hugley’s Parenting While Black intervention, Drs. Engel, Goodkind, and Shook’s Wage Study or Drs. Wallace, Moon, Jones, and Durham’s CHURCH project. Pitt Faculty’s research consistently addresses systems of oppression and builds culturally grounded interventions that support existing strengths. Our commitment to conducting research grounded in the community can be seen across most of our faculty’s research, exemplified in Drs. Goodkind and Shook’s NIJ-funded research project evaluating the impact of Caring Connections on the disproportionality of youth incarceration or Drs. Ohmer and Jacobs’s ReCAST Project, designed to build collective efficacy in neighborhoods. Pitt faculty’s commitment to critical, rigorous and community-engaged research continues to produce excellent social work scholarship that is moving the field forward.
Some exciting things are happening at Pitt that I want to highlight. Under the new direction of Dr. Kyaien Conner, and building on late Dean Larry Davis’s legacy, the Center on Race and Social Problems continues to advance research that identifies and addresses the role of racism in social problems and promotes the quality of life of all Americans. Not only have CRSP researchers recently secured over $5 million dollars for race-related research, but the center is also working to support a robust network of race-related centers and scholars both at the University of Pittsburgh and nationally. In addition to our strong research centers, we have established four faculty-initiated research collaboratives for the first time this year in Public Social Work, Human Flourishing, Healthy Aging, and Care Work. These collaboratives were designed to be flexible and support faculty innovation, and I am excited about the work they are already beginning to accomplish.
Since becoming ADR in 2023, I have had the privilege of working with my colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh to continue to build and collaboratively expand our research and its impact. In this publication, you will read stories about some excellent research that my colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh are conducting, but this is not exhaustive. Our robust research portfolio has resulted in 18 new awards in 2024 and over $21.8 million dollars in annual research expenditures from the ACF, NIH, NIJ, NSF, DOE, and CDC, in addition to many local foundations and state contracts. Across all our research projects, Pitt faculty’s seeks to provide evidence for new models of social work practice and rigorous research that can be used to shift policy, ensuring real-world impact. If you would like to see more of the excellent work that our faculty are doing, be sure to visit socialwork.pitt.edu/research. I look forward to all that we will accomplish in the new year.
Jaime Booth, PhD
Associate Dean of Research
University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work