Haviland Briefs

Faculty Appointments

We are proud to announce our faculty promotions and appointments with tenure.

Adrian Aguilera

Associate Professor

Paul R. Sterzing

Associate Professor

Valerie Shapiro

Associate Professor

Susan Stone

Professor Catherine Mary and Eileen Clare Hutto Chair of Social Services in Public Education

FACULTY NOTES

Associate Professor Adrian Aguilera was a visiting scholar in Mexico City at the Mexican National Institute of Psychiatry. He presented a talk entitled “Design Considerations for mHealth Interventions with Low Income, Ethnic Minority Patients” at the International Society for Research on Internet Interventions in Auckland, NZ in February, and published two papers with colleagues: “Effectiveness of a Multimodal Digital Psychotherapy Platform for Adult Depression: A Naturalistic Feasibility Study” in JMIR Mhealth Uhealth and “A Seat at the Table: Strategic Engagement in Service Activities for Early Career Faculty From Underrepresented Groups in the Academy” in Academic Medicine.

Professor Jill Duerr Berrick’s book The Impossible Imperative: Navigating the Competing Principles of Child Protection has received an honorable mention for the 2019 Outstanding Social Work Book Award, conferred by the Society for Social Work and Research. She has given numerous book talks, including at the University of Tampere (Finland), the EUSARF conference in Porto (Portugal), the University of Washington School of Social Work, and the Mississippi State Child Welfare Conference. Professor Berrick was also selected to participate in the UC Women’s Initiative, a systemwide program of professional development for University staff and faculty, as well as the Chancellor’s Strategic Initiative Working Group on Inequality and Opportunity.

Assistant Professor Yu-Ling Chang received the 2019 W.E. Upjohn Institute Early Career Research Award to carry out her new research project, “The Gendered Effects of Unemployment Insurance Modernization on Benefit Receipt and Employment Patterns among Unemployed Workers.”

Professor Julian Chow received the 2018 Model Alumni Award from the Alumni Association of Tunghai University in Taiwan. The award recognizes alumni with records of accomplishments and contributions made to the social good.

Dean Jeff Edleson and PhD student Laura Brignone had their article titled “The Dating and Domestic Violence App Rubric: Synthesizing Clinical Best Practices and Digital Health App Standards for Relationship Violence Prevention Smartphone Apps” accepted for publication in the International Journal of Human- Computer Interaction. Dean Edleson participated on a panel with other deans on hiring and retaining Latinx faculty at the National Association of Deans and Directors (NADD) of Social Work Programs at its Spring meeting in San Diego in April. Last fall, Dean Edleson was interviewed for a series of radio segments and articles exploring the Hague Convention on child abduction as it relates to cases involving domestic violence and New Zealand courts.

Professor of the Graduate School Eileen Gambrill’s latest book, Critical Thinking and the Process of Evidence-based Practice, was published by Oxford University Press. Two additional publications, “The Promotion of Avoidable Ignorance in the British Journal of Social Work” and “Criticism and its Critics: Reply to Holloway and Golightley,” appeared in Research in Social Work Practice.

Professor Neil Gilbert presented his report “Towards Family Sensitive Social Protection,” at the 57th Session of the UN Commission for Social Development in New York City. In addition to co-chairing the Fifth Annual Meeting of the International Network for Social Policy Teaching and Research in Bergen, Norway, Gilbert gave lectures in Norway as well as France, Italy, Qatar, and Spain.

Assistant Professor Anu Manchkanti Gómez published an article entitled “The Misclassification of Ambivalence in Pregnancy Intentions: A Mixed-Methods Analysis,” and her research was cited in a California Health Report article, “Pharmacists Can Now Prescribe Birth Control, but Few Do.”

Another Kind of Madness: A Journey through the Stigma and Hope of Mental Illness, affiliated faculty member Stephen Hinshaw’s account of his family’s experience with his father’s bipolar disorder, won the American Book Fest’s 2018 award for best autobiography or memoir.

Assistant Professor Erin Kerrison spent a year on leave as the Vice President of Research at the Center for Policing Equity (CPE) housed at the CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she led an interdisciplinary team of social scientists, legal scholars, and data technicians. Kerrison’s featured commentary, “Prison Drug Treatment Programs are Failing People of Color,” was published in the Center for American Progress project TalkPoverty, and she has also published three forthcoming peer-reviewed articles: “On Creating Ethical, Productive, and Durable Action Research Partnerships with Police Officers and Their Departments: A Case Study of the National Justice Database” (Police Practice and Research: An International Journal); “The Mismeasure of Terry Stops: Assessing the Psychological and Emotional Harms of Stop and Frisk to Individuals and Communities” (Behavioral Sciences & the Law); and “When Policing Causes Crime: The Criminogenic Effects of Police Stops on Adolescent Black and Latino Boys” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America).

Professor of the Graduate School Jim Midgley gave the keynote address — entitled “Developmental Social Work: Principles and Practice”— to the International Conference on Developmental Social Work at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in May 2018. The December 2018 issue of the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare was a special issue in Jim Midgley’s honor, containing papers presented at a Berkeley symposium organized in his honor prior to his retirement.

In recognition of exemplary research that focuses on psychosocial problems within the Chicano and Latino communities, Professor Kurt C. Organista was selected for the Chancellor’s Public Scholar Faculty Fellowship for 2018 - 2019. He was also invited to join the new Chancellor’s Undocumented Community Council. In early January, he participated in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry’s Grand Rounds lecture series for clinical professionals; his talk was entitled “A Structural Environmental Approach to Problem Drinking and HIV Risk in Latino Migrant Day Laborers.”

Assistant Professor Tina Sacks was interviewed by Berkeley News about her book, Invisible Visits: Black Middle-Class Women in the American Healthcare System. An op-ed published on the Oxford University Press blog, “The Ongoing Significance of Racism in American Medicine,” looks at the issue of racism in American healthcare in the context of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study and its impact on the families and descendants of those involved.

Professor of the Graduate School Steven Segal’s articles include “Contributors to Screening Positive for Mental Illness in Lebanon’s Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp,” with Khoury, Salah, and Ghannam, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease; “Wellbeing and Growth among Syrian Refugees in Jordan” with Rizkalla in Journal of Traumatic Stress; and “The Utility of Outpatient Commitment: Acute Medical Care Access and Protecting Health” with Hayes and Rimes in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.

Associate Professor Valerie Shapiro co-authored “Seven Action Steps to Unleash the Power of Prevention” and (with doctoral student Juyeon Lee) “Multilevel structural equation modeling for social work researchers: An introduction and an application to healthy youth development” in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research.

Shapiro was selected as a Top Ten Finalist for the 2019 William T. Grant Scholars Program to Study the Use of Research Evidence. She was selected as a UC Women’s Initiative Program Facilitator for UC’s Women’s Leadership Development Program and was also appointed to the Board of Directors for the National Prevention Science Coalition. Shapiro also published with co-author Kelly Ziemer a paper entitled “Efficient Implementation Monitoring in Routine Prevention Practice: A Grand Challenge for Schools” in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, and guest-edited with Kimberly Bender a special issue of the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research entitled “Ensuring Healthy Development for All Youth Through the Power of Prevention.” Shapiro was an invited speaker at the 2018 International Summit on Violence, Abuse, and Trauma Across the Lifespan.

Professor Jennifer Skeem was awarded the Edwin L. Megargee Scientist-Practitioner Award by the International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology. In a new paper accepted for publication in Psychological Assessment, Dr. Perman Gochyyev and Professor Skeem present an efficient measure of the quality of relationships between professionals and clients when treatment is mandated. Additionally, Dr. Skeem’s article with lead author Ellicott Matthay, “Exposure to Community Violence and Self-Harm in California: A Multi-Level Population-Based Case-Control Study,” was published in Epidemiology, and she presented on “Race, Risk, and Recidivism” as part of a national panel held at the Vanderbilt Law School on “Big Data and Criminal Justice: Equity and Fairness.”

Professor Skeem’s work on psychopathic personality disorder was featured in a recent article in Psychology Today titled “What We Get Wrong About Psychopaths.” Professor Skeem was also featured in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio documentary titled “Creating Conscience: A History of Treating the Psychopath.”

spotlight: Black MSW Alumni Reunion

Wakanda forever! Black students, alumni, staff, and faculty gathered at the home of Roger Daniels (MSW ‘95) and Director of Field Education Greg Merrill.

FIELD CONSULTANT NOTES

Field Consultant Andrea Dubrow was named a 2018 Honored Instructor by UC Berkeley Extension in recognition of her teaching excellence and for personifying a professional commitment to lifelong learning. She is the coordinator of BASSC’s Executive Development Program at UC Extension, a leadership training program that targets mid-level managers of county social service program.

Child Welfare Scholars Project Coordinator/Lecturer Christina Feliciana made a presentation about ethical considerations in adoption at the LGBTQ Foster-Adoption Mini Conference sponsored by the Our Family Coalition. At the CalSWEC Title IV-E Summit in April 2018, she co-facilitated a workshop entitled, “#Hairbeads: Unpacking the racial binary,” focusing on the role of individual use of self and implicit bias among child welfare practitioners.

Field Consultant Susana Fong, Director of Field Education Greg Merrill, and CalSWEC Mental Health Program Director Maxwell Davis co-instructed a course in interprofessional collaboration as part of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Integrated Behavioral Health Stipend Program led by Dr. Davis. The course involved a simulation with actors playing an elder care scenario that requires health disciplines to collaborate to meet the family’s emerging needs.

STUDENT NOTES

Brita A. Bookser presented her paper “Alternative Schools and the Occupation of the Expulsion-Prison Nexus” at the Prison University Project’s conference Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reform: 21st Century Solutions to 20th Century Problems at San Quentin State Prison in October 2018. She subsequently spoke about the connections between education and recidivism at a Teachers’ Forum event at San Quentin in February.

Jaclyn Chambers was selected to receive the California Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s (CAPSAC) Paul Crissey Award for 2019. The award recognizes outstanding research by a graduate student in the field of child maltreatment.

Maggie Downey was selected by the National Association of Social Work Foundation to receive the 2018-19 Jane B. Aron Health Care Education and Leadership Scholars (HEALS) Doctoral Fellowship.

Rachel Gartner accepted a position of Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work; her dissertation is entitled “From Gender Microaggressions to Sexual Assault: Measure Development and Preliminary Trends Among Undergraduate Women.”

Walter Gómez co-authored an article titled “Randomized Controlled Trial of a Positive Affect Intervention for Methamphetamine Users” and published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence. He presented a number of conference papers, including “How Academic Social Workers Negotiate their Practice and Research Selves in the Field” at the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in Edinburgh, Scotland, “Qualitative Research as a Means to Sustain Social Work’s Identity” at the SSWR in San Francisco, and “(Re)positioning Sexual Health among Populations Underserved by PrEP: An Institutional Case Study” at the Social Work and Sexualities Conference in Montreal; this paper was co-authored by faculty members Anu Manchikanti Gomez and Kurt Organista, as well as Sheilalyn Solis (MSW ‘18).

Walter Gomez

Woojin Jung accepted a job as Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. In 2018, she was awarded an InFEWS travel grant funded by the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship Program (NRT); she used the grant to collect data for her research on the spatial distribution of community development projects in Myanmar in collaboration with the World Bank.

Juyeon Lee published a paper entitled “South Korean Children’s Academic Achievement and Subjective Well-Being: The Mediation of Academic Stress and the Moderation of Perceived Fairness of Parents and Teachers” in Children and Youth Services Review. This paper was also presented at the SSWR conference.

Briana Mcgeough accepted a position of Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare; her dissertation is entitled “Understanding Co-Occurring Depression Symptoms and Alcohol Use Symptoms Among Sexual Minority Women.”

Katie Savin was named a 2018-19 Mentored Research Fellow, and her research proposal, “How SSI and SSDI Beneficiaries Work Around and Within Current Labor Incentive Programs,” was approved for funding by the Social Security Administration’s Analyzing Relationships between Disability, Rehabilitation and Work (ARDRAW) Small Grant Program.

Valentin Sierra received the Brandon Harrison Award for Youth Leadership and Youth Advocacy from the Sierra Health Foundation and UC Davis.

Matthew Smith, Lead Outreach Peer Adviser at the Cal Veteran Services Center, testified before the UC Board of Regents to advocate in favor of improved coordination between the Veterans Health Administration and the UC campuses. He also joined the board of the Veterans Accession House, which provides housing for homeless and at-risk student veterans.

CENTER NOTES

As part of their work with the Guizhou Berkeley Big Data Innovation Research Center (GBIC-Berkeley), Professor Julian Chow, Professor Susan Stone and Dr. Marla Stuart traveled to Guiyang, China in December 2018 to present at the 2018 Berkeley Livelihood Big Data “Digital Valley and Silicon Valley” Workshop. In January, Chow, Professor Andrew Scharlach, Stone and Stuart were panelists in a symposium entitled “Testing the Feasibility of Harnessing Big Data for Social Good: Experiences of the Guizhou Berkeley Big Data Innovation Research Center” at the SSWR Conference in San Francisco. In February, Chow, Stone, and Stuart gave presentations during the visit from the Korean Research Center for Guardianship and Trusts (KCGAT) delegation to the School of Social Welfare, and Stuart gave a presentation during the visit from the Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University.

The Latinx Center of Excellence hosted Terapia Solidaria: Narrative Therapy Practice in solidarity with Latinx Communities with presenters marcela polanco and Luna Calderon. Offered in Spanish, the workshop provided an overview of narrative therapy practice concepts and of marcela polanco’s terapia solidaria.

STAFF NOTES

On December 14, Faculty Support Coordinator Loretta Morales celebrated 40 years of keeping things running smoothly in Haviland Hall!

Loretta Morales