Brown School › 2019 › Page 12

The Brown School is proud to recognize the work and career outcomes of recent PhD graduates. Their research focuses on a wide range of areas nationally and globally: social engagement and dementia, child well-being and nutrition, successful aging, medical disparities, rural populations, adolescent physical and mental health, and suicide prevention.

All of these graduates have published in peer-reviewed journals, and their scholarship has been recognized with multiple awards, fellowships and honors.

May 2019 Graduates

Takashi Amano: Assistant Professor,  Rutgers University

Dissertation: “Social Engagement Among Older Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Conversion to Dementia”

Chien-Jen Chiang: Assistant Professor, Louisiana State University

Dissertation: “Subtypes of Neglect in Relation to Reporting Practices, Safety Outcomes among Known Cases, and Risk and Protective Factors”

Katherine Marcal: Assistant Professor, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Dissertation: “Promoting Child Well-being in Homeless Services: A Community-based System Dynamics Approach”

Erin Stringfellow:  Substance Abuse Research Scientist, Missouri Institute of Mental Health

Dissertation: “You Have to Want It: Mental Models of Addiction Recovery and their Implications for Sustainable Interventions”

Yi Wang: Assistant Professor, University of Iowa

Dissertation: “Neighborhood Environment, Social Participation, and Well-Being among Older Adults in the U.S. “

Ellie Wideman: Assistant Professor, Maryville University

Dissertation: “Case Terminations Reasons by Case Characteristics and Child Welfare Involvement”

Ivy Blackmore: Position Pending

Dissertation: “A Formative Assessment of the Vulnerability Context of Three Indigenous Communities in Rural Ecuador for Improved Intervention Design”

December 2018 Graduates

Andrae Banks: Assistant Professor, North Carolina Central University

Dissertation:”Examining the Impact of Financial Well-being upon Black Adolescent Socioemotional Outcomes”

Haley Becker: Adjunct Professor, Washington University

Dissertation: “Understanding Adolescent Physical Activity in the Early Nutrition Transitioning Country of Haiti”

Michael McLaughlin: Teaching Professor,  Washington University’s Olin Business School

Dissertation: “Three Essays on Taxation and Child Maltreatment”

Raven Ross: Health Science Administrator (MSPI/DVPI Data Coordinator), Indian Health Service/Office of Human Resources

Dissertation: “An Exploratory Mixed Methods Study of the Implementation and Evaluation of the Methamphetamine and Suicide Prevention Initiative (MSPI)”

August 2018 Graduates

Lisa Pollack: Postdoctoral Research Associate, Washington University School of Medicine 

Dissertation: “Racial/Ethnic Disparity in Surgical Approach and Post-Operative Complications for Hysterectomy Among Women with Benign Gynecologic Conditions”

Divya Ravindranath: Post-Doctoral Fellow, Indian Institute for Human Settlements

Dissertation: “Maternal Health and Child Malnutrition Among Migrant Households Engaged in Construction Work: Experiences, Challenges and Policy Gaps”

When Robert Sagastume earned a full-ride scholarship to the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he thought he had achieved the American Dream. He had emigrated from Honduras as a young boy and worked hard to master English. Long hours of studying paid off — he graduated at the top of his high school class and now would be the first in his family to go to college and ultimately, he hoped, law school.

But state law forced him to put his dream on hold. Sagastume didn’t know it at the time, but his visa had expired and he had become undocumented. And because Missouri bars undocumented students from receiving public scholarships, financial aid or in-state tuition at public universities, he could not enroll.

“I lost everything,” said Sagastume, who lived with his mother and older siblings. “I always believed you could be anybody you wanted to be in America. It hurt to realize I was wrong.”

Spoiler alert: It all works out for Sagastume, who graduated from Washington University in St. Louis last December with a master’s degree in social work from the Brown School and will earn his master’s in social policy in December. As the Clark-Fox Policy Institute Scholar, he received the Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy outstanding student of the year award, was selected to attend the 11th annual Clinton Global Initiative University and married fellow Brown School student Dustin Fish. 

But back in 2007, the future looked bleak. Sagastume had resigned himself to roofing and landscaping jobs when one day, on his way to work, a car full of teenagers chucked a Cherry Coke in his face.

“They told me, ‘Hop back to your own country, grasshopper,’” Sagastume recalled. “When I heard that, I was like, ‘No! I am not a grasshopper. I came to this country to be someone, to do better. I’m not going to let my documentation limit who I am or what I become.’”

That’s when Sagastume saw an ad for a college fair for undocumented immigrants that was organized by the Kansas/Missouri Dream Alliance. He was afraid to attend. What if it was trap set by law enforcement? But his desire to earn a degree outweighed the fear. That day changed his life.

“First, I learned that, unlike Missouri, Kansas extends in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants. After that, I enrolled at Johnson County Community College,” Sagastume said. “Meeting the members of the Kansas/Missouri Dream Alliance also started me on my path of activism. Here were people who were very open about their status, advocating for laws and policies that protect immigrant rights and helping students access higher education. I knew I wanted to be a part of that.”

Sagastume became the group’s co-director and facilitated a successful peer-to-peer mentoring program called Dreamer2Dreamer that aimed to keep undocumented youth in high school. That experience led to an internship in Oakland, Calif., where he worked with community organizers advancing workplace safety, an important issue for immigrants. Who were these organizers, he wondered.

“I was like, ‘You get paid for doing this? What did you study?’” Sagastume said. “That’s when I first learned about social work.”

By then, President Barack Obama instituted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and Sagastume was able to work and study without fear of deportation. He transferred to the University of Kansas, a top school for clinical social work, where he learned how to provide trauma-informed support to immigrant families.

But Sagastume also wanted to enact policies that can lead to broad social change.Enter the Brown School, which had just launched its master of social policy dual-degree program.

“Working one-on-one with young people is something I love, love, love, but I wanted an education that focused on research, analysis and leadership,” Sagastume said. “I found all of that at the Brown School.”

Michal Grinstein-Weiss, the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor and associate dean for policy initiatives, immediately recognized Sagastume’s talent and offered him a scholarship here.

“Robert’s life story and passion make him an effective leader,” Grinstein-Weiss said. “But he also is an incredible student who has embraced every opportunity to learn more about the policy issues and how to remove policy and institutional barriers on local, state and federal levels.

“Improving the lives of many people requires certain skills, like knowing how to lobby and write policy briefs and use evidence in the right way,” she said. “Robert has worked really, really hard to acquire those tools.”

Sagastume put his Brown School education to work last spring in Jefferson City as a legislative intern for the Missouri House of Representatives, where he promoted a bill that would extend in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants. The measure was soundly rejected by lawmakers, who said it would take away opportunities from U.S. citizens and provide an incentive for people to immigrate illegally.

But Sagastume has not given up the fight. To him, expanded college access is a win for all Missourians. 

“The truth is the Latinx community is very family oriented so these young people aren’t going anywhere,” Sagastume said. “In addition, Latinx people are very community oriented and often pursue careers in nursing and teaching — positions that are going unfilled in our state. Why wouldn’t you want to leverage all of that potential to benefit our state?”

Washington University’s 29th annual Pow Wow, a celebration of American Indian cultures, was held on Saturday, April 20, in the Field House on the Danforth Campus.

Hosted by the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies at the Brown School, the community event allows Native and non-Native people alike get together to dance, sing, and honor the traditions, cultures, and histories of Native peoples. The theme of this year’s event was “Keep Them Sacred: Honoring Generations of Indigenous Women.” More than 2,000 people attended, and representatives from many tribes across the Midwest participated. 

“This year’s Pow Wow was fantastic. It was amazing to watch all of the Buder staff and committee’s work pay off,” said Kelley McCall, an MSW/MPH student, enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, and co-chair of the 2019 Pow Wow. “It was a really positive experience to celebrate American Indian culture, on a beautiful campus, with Natives from across the country. The community contributions make this event a success every year.”

This year, two mothers wanted to celebrate their daughters’ first Pow Wow with a special induction ceremony. The girls were welcomed into the community and the celebration. The Pow Wow also featured an installation of the REDress Project, which honors missing and murdered indigenous women and was displayed at the university in 2018.

Washington University is located on Illini, Osage, and Miami land. Buder Center students believe that Pow Wow is a particularly important event for Native students and university staff, faculty, students and others to celebrate and honor indigenous peoples, as well as acknowledge the university’s own responsibility to make room for native history and culture today.

“Being a part of such an honored tradition reminded me of why I want to represent my Native culture and pursue my education revolving around strengthening American Indian/Alaska Native well-being,” said McCall. “Coming together as a Buder family and St. Louis community was indescribable.”

Margaret Clancy was a trust company vice president when she enrolled in classes at the Brown School. She envisioned her master’s studies as a future hedge against a downturn in the financial industry, as well as a way to satisfy her desire to contribute to social justice.

“I wanted to be sure my work would make a positive difference in people’s lives,” she said.

Now, more than two decades later, she is one of the nation’s leading experts on Child Development Accounts (CDAs), a concept pioneered by her Brown School mentor, Michael Sherraden, and one that has influenced policy across the U.S. and the world. The gains have been in large part due to Clancy’s 20-year second career as the policy director at the Center for Social Development (CSD) and an ambassador for asset building in diverse populations.

Six states have CDAs, funded at birth to give children a financial head start – with some providing additional deposits for those from families with low income.  Other states have expressed an interest and most recently, the center received a grant to continue measuring the impact of SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK)  an experiment that began in 2007 by testing the policy idea of universal and progressive accounts for postsecondary education. The child-account concept has also gained traction at the federal level. Presidential candidate Corey Booker and some economists are promoting “Baby Bonds” as a way to build a financial foundation for children.  And Sherraden has suggested that the CDA model could be used to solve the potentially knotty problem of how to administer reparations to the descendants of slaves if that idea is adopted.

“Margaret is the leading expert in the United States regarding policy design and implementation for Child Development Accounts,” Sherraden said. “Her expertise has also directly affected CDA design and implementation in Israel and other countries. She is directly improving the lives of literally millions of children in America and abroad.”

When she started her studies at the Brown School in 1994, Clancy thought mental health would be her academic focus.  She started to change her mind after reading “Assets and the Poor,” the 1991 book by Sherraden, one of her teachers, who is now the George Warren Brown Distinguished Professor at the Brown School and the director of CSD. She was intrigued by the proposed child accounts, but her on-the-ground experience in the world of finance made her question how the idea would be put into practice.

“I asked him, ‘How are these accounts going to be run efficiently?'” she recalled. “‘He said, ‘You’re going to figure that out.'”

The challenge further piqued Clancy’s interest, but what “sealed the deal,” as she put it, was a 1995 conference in Chicago on the then-new field of asset building which she attended as a student. As she listened to Sherraden and others talk in a non-academic setting about the real-world impact they envisioned, she reflected on her own life.

“My family struggled financially when I was young, but the concept of social justice – caring for others – was always in the forefront,” she said.  At the trust company, she dealt with wealthy families and big institutions – including Washington University — but also with factory workers who didn’t understand how investing small amounts over time could yield a healthy sum for their retirement.

Suddenly, she saw her future.

“I sat there thinking this would be a perfect way to meld my financial experience with my goal to contribute to society,” she said.  “This is a way I could hit the ground running in social work. I should do this.” She walked out of the conference to a pay phone (1995!) and called her Brown School advisor with the news that she needed to switch her focus to economic development and policy.

Clancy joined CSD after graduation, and tackled the challenge Sherraden had set out for her: crafting Child Development Accounts so that they would be both effective and sustainable. She soon realized that the 529 college savings plans that states were beginning to offer could be a good model. With financing from the Ford Foundation, the Center partnered with the Oklahoma State Treasurer’s office for the experiment.  After just over 2,700 mothers of newborns randomly selected from state birth records completed a baseline interview, half of their children received a $1,000 deposit in an Oklahoma 529 account and half were randomly assigned to the control group.

The CSD team created a rigorous research plan to test the effectiveness of the accounts. In 2011, researchers conducted a second interview of mothers who were participating in the study; the third round of interviews will be in 2020, when their children will be about 12 years old.  Early results for those who received the account have been promising:

Those results, detailed in some 30 peer-reviewed, published papers based on SEED OK, have been crucial to the decisions of other states to establish their own policies for kids. Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have programs, also using the 529 plan as a financial platform. More recently, Nebraska began to consider a statewide policy; Clancy testified in February before the state’s Senate Education Committee.

Especially promising are the statewide CDAs in Maine and Pennsylvania, which set aside seed funds to every child in the state at birth. In Maine the program is funded by a philanthropist. Initially, it offered the funds only to families who enrolled, and 40% of eligible children participated. Clancy and Sherraden used SEED OK results to influence a policy change: beginning in 2013, all Maine newborns are automatically enrolled. Today assets in Maine are valued at more than $100 million and impact more than 85,000 children. In 2018, Pennsylvania’s bi-partisan legislation provided $100 to each newborn in the state; it’s now the nation’s largest CDA.

“Our vision was always to influence policy on a grand scale,” Clancy said, with “Every kid on the planet,” the team’s goal. Not only does providing every child with an account increase the program’s impact, she said, it removes a potential stigma if only poor families were permitted to participate. In Oklahoma the new grant expands the original, automatic deposit, with larger amounts for disadvantaged children.

Clancy said the accounts are especially impactful for families whose financial focus is often limited to getting through the week. “Our theory, which has held true to date, is that parents will be more future-oriented” when they see the account statements for their children, she said.

She expects the study in Oklahoma will last well after she and Sherraden retire. She’s proud of the legacy that her work will leave, and is quick to credit the team of professors, consultants and staff with whom she has worked for the Center’s achievements.

“It really is humbling,” she said.

The Brown School 2019 Recognition Ceremony will feature speeches by national radio personality and civil rights activist Joe Madison and Missouri Representative and Brown School alumna Cora Faith Walker, MPH ’10.

For the second year, the Brown School ceremony will also include a student speaker, MPH candidate Aishwarya Nagar, who was selected after submission of a topic essay and an interview with a School community committee. 

“We are so thrilled that we have such a broad range of speakers this year who will lend their personal insights, equity perspectives, and wisdom to our graduating cohort,” said Mary McKay, Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School. 

The marshals, who carry the banners of their respective programs during the Brown School Recognition processional and recessional, were also selected according to their commitment to scholarship and the Brown School community. Marshals for 2019 will be:

Faculty Marshal: Douglas Luke

MSW Marshal: Luther Tyus

MPH Marshal: Ruth Katumba

MSW/MPH Marshal: Julia Hughes

MSP Marshal: Shiqiu Li 

The Brown School Recognition Ceremony will be held Thursday, May 16, at 7:30 p.m. at the Field House within the Athletic Complex of Washington University in St. Louis. It precedes the university’s 158th Commencement ceremony, which will begin at 8:30 a.m. Friday, May 17, in Brookings Quadrangle on the Danforth Campus. The university commencement address will be delivered by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City and founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies. 

About the Speakers

Joe Madison, Radio Personality and Civil Rights Activist

Joe Madison has devoted his career to raising awareness about issues around the world, encouraging dialogue among people of different backgrounds and raising money to support multicultural education and institutions. Known as “The Black Eagle,” Joe can be heard weekday mornings on SiriusXM’s Urban View.

A graduate of Washington University, Madison was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he rose to become a member of the national board. His radio career began in 1980 in Detroit, and he eventually moved to Washington, D.C. and syndication on the Radio One Talk Network and its XM satellite channel.

Madison uses his show as a platform for inspiring action on critical issues affecting the African American community. A Fellow of the William Greenleaf Eliot Society, Madison has supported scholarships, athletics, and the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement at Washington University. 

Cora Faith Walker, Missouri House of Representatives

Rep. Cora Faith Walker, Democrat, was elected in 2016 to represent parts of North St. Louis County.  She is an attorney with a health law certification and soon gained a reputation in the legislature as an expert in health law and public policy. She is the ranking minority member of the House Health and Mental Health Policy Committee and serves on several other health-related committees. 

In addition to her work as a legislator, Walker has served on multiple nonprofit boards and on the Community Advisory Board for the St. Louis Regional Health Commission. She has received a number of accolades, including the Emily’s List Award, the “Gabrielle Giffords Rising Star Award,” and the “Rising Star Award” from NARAL Prochoice.

A graduate of both Washington University and the inaugural MPH class at the Brown School, she received her law degree and Health Law Certificate from the Saint Louis University School of Law. 

Aishwarya Nagar, MPH Candidate ’19

Nagar is passionate about the intersections of gender equity, humanitarian health, and global public health. For her global health practicum, she worked on formative maternal nutrition and air quality research in Cap-Haitien, Haiti.

Since arriving at the Brown School, Nagar has worked with the E3 Nutrition Lab and Global Health Center and recruited students as a Student Ambassador for the Office of Admissions. She has served in leadership roles for Global Heath at Brown, Student Coordinating Council, and Cells to Society Journal Club. She is the outgoing president of the campus-wide Global Health Student Advisory Committee, which organized the 4th Annual Global Health Week. She is also part of the newly launched Midwest chapter of Women in Global Health.

Originally from New Delhi, India, Nagar was a Presidential Fellow at Wake Forest University where she completed her BS degree. After graduating from the Brown School, she hopes to work on initiatives that address pressing global health issues and improve the wellbeing of vulnerable communities globally. 

Training the next generation of health and social science scholars in systems science methods is the goal of a new institute that will debut this summer at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

The first annual Systems Science for Social Impact Summer Training Institute will be held at the Brown School July 29 – August 2.

The institute will be led by three of the nation’s leaders in systems science: Ross Hammond, Betty Bofinger Brown Associate Professor; Peter Hovmand, professor of practice and the founding director of the Social System Design Lab; and Douglas Luke, professor and director of the Center for Public Health Systems Science.

Participants at the five-day institute will get a hands-on introduction to systems science methods that enhance the social impact of health and social science research. Attendees will choose from three major systems science methods: agent-based modeling, social network analysis, or system dynamics. Participants will become familiar with major concepts, learn analytic best practices, and apply the methods to real-world data. They also will have ample opportunities to interact with each other, instructors, and outside experts across tracks.

 The application process is open, and candidates will be accepted on a rolling basis through July 1, 2019.

For more information or to apply, visit the institute’s website. 

“The Brown School now has a critical mass of expertise on systems science methods,” Luke said. “There is a lack of availability of training in these areas in social work, public health, and other applied social sciences, creating an unmet need.”