Lindsay Stark, Expert on Welfare of Women and Children, Joins the Brown School

Faculty

Lindsay Stark, an expert on the welfare of children and women globally, will join the Brown School faculty July 1 as an associate professor, teaching classes in both social work and public health.

Stark joins the Brown School from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Her work focuses on prevention of violence, and the psychosocial health and well-being of women and children in humanitarian and development settings.

Stark and colleagues pioneered the Neighborhood Method to measure the prevalence of human rights violations, including gender-based violence. She has developed locally validated measures of well-being, and has developed novel approaches to measuring the number of children separated from their caregivers in a humanitarian emergency.

Stark recently concluded a multi-nation evaluation of an intervention to reduce violence against conflict-affected adolescent girls in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan. She has also been working with UNICEF in Haiti and Colombia to look at the intersections of violence against women in their homes, a largely understudied phenomenon in humanitarian contexts. Stark is also currently leading a study on the psychosocial well-being of refugee adolescents settled in the United States to better understand how schools and communities might support them.

Stark said she is looking forward to building on this work, and furthering her research across disciplinary lines at the Brown School.

“One of the things I really love about the Brown School is that it encompasses both public health and social work,” she said. “The issues I work on can’t be solved through one discipline. You need to be able to look at them from a number of perspectives.”

“I’ve also been very impressed by the dedication, collegiality, and energy of the faculty and the student body,” she said. “It seems like a very supportive environment for doing cutting-edge research, with a lot of opportunities for collaboration.”

Stark previously served as director of the Care and Protection of Children (CPC) Learning Network, a global network that convenes academics, policymakers and practitioners to promote innovative research and nurture communities of learning on children and families worldwide.