Dorian Traube is the Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School and a professor. Previously, Traube was a professor in the Suzanne Dworak Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California.
Traube developed Parents as Teachers@USC Telehealth, the first partnership of its kind between a national home visitation model and a university-based telehealth clinic. In doing so, she also established the first virtual home visitation program, offering a reliable home visitation model via video conferencing technology.
This program was chosen as a Named Commitment by the Clinton Global Initiative and was selected the winner of the Gary Community Investment/OpenIDEO Early Childhood Innovation Prize. The program was scaled from offering 1,000 home visits in 2016-2019 to offering 600,000 virtual home visits in 2020. On the workforce development side, the program initially trained 25 home visitors in virtual service delivery strategies and scaled to 12,000 home visitors by 2020. Traube’s research into the telehealth program laid the foundation for a multimillion-dollar award from the Heising-Simons Foundation to make virtual home visitation available nationally during the COVID-19 crisis.
Traube’s research agenda focuses on the utilization of technological solutions to provide early childhood health, education and parent support services. She has expertise in children’s mental health, child maltreatment prevention, family support interventions and home visitation. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Parsons Foundation, Queenscare Foundation, and the Overdeck Foundation. Traube serves on the Board of Directors for Good Shepard School, Youth in Need, the Research Advisory Council for Parents as Teachers, and the Hermann Center Institutional Advisory Board.
Traube earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and her master and doctoral degrees in social work from Columbia University. She is a licensed clinical social worker in California and New York.
Harmony Rhoades’ research is focused on health and well-being for underserved populations, in particular sexual and gender minority youth and those who have experienced homelessness and housing instability. Her work examines mental health, suicide prevention, social networks, HIV prevention and sexual health behavior, substance use and misuse, pet ownership, and structural factors that impact health. She is currently a co-Investigator on multiple NIH-funded studies exploring health and well-being among sexual and gender minority youth.
Rhoades has served on the Research Council of the National Alliance to End Homelessness and as an NIH Review Panel Member. She has published more than 90 peer-reviewed academic journal articles, including in Pediatrics, American Journal of Public Health, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, and AIDS and Behavior. She began her career in HIV prevention research as a pre-doctoral trainee in the UCLA Service Systems for Persons Living with HIV/AIDS Research Training Program; received the Mark Etzel Young Investigator Award from the UCLA Center for HIV Identification, Prevention and Treatment Services; and served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Southern California School of Social Work. She was on the research faculty for more than a decade at the USC School of Social Work, where she served as multi-PI, Co-Investigator, or key personnel on numerous NIH-funded research grants, projects funded by other agencies, and innovative pilot studies.
Wendy Auslander focuses broadly on the intersection of health and mental health among adolescents and vulnerable populations, with an emphasis on intervention research. She studies behavioral and psychosocial factors in diabetes and HIV prevention, trauma treatment for improving mental health and health outcomes, adolescent risk behaviors, and minority health and health disparities. Auslander’s research has informed her teaching in the areas of health behavior theory, intervention research methods and research methods.
The National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Prevention and Control and the Annie E. Casey Foundation have funded many of her research projects. Previous research has been funded by and/or in collaboration with the Center for Violence and Injury Prevention, the Washington University School of Medicine Diabetes and Research Center, the Center for Social Development, the Center for Mental Health Services Research, and the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies.
She also serves on numerous editorial boards such as the Journal of Early Adolescence and Health and Social Work, and reviews for a variety of other health-related and social work journals. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and a fellow of the Society of Social Work and Research.
Ellis Ballard is an Associate Professor of Practice at the Brown School and at the School of Public Health. His body of work focuses on partnering with research & community partners on the use of participatory systems science & design methods to develop community-driven strategies, and on leading methodological innovation on the use of these tools. He is the specialization chair for the Brown School’s System Dynamics Specialization and teaches courses in Community Based System Dynamics, System Dynamics Simulation for Strategic Design, and SD Applied Practice Labs. He is the former Director and advisor for the Brown School’s Social System Design Lab.
In addition to his work at the Brown School, Ellis is a Founding Partner at Tributary Design, a strategic design partnership that works with community organizations, health systems, and researchers apply system dynamics modeling to examine complex problems and human-centered design to translate insights into action.
Prior to joining the Brown School, Ellis worked in disability rights advocacy and research. He advanced disability rights advocacy in U.S foreign affairs and contributed to capacity building efforts and program evaluations with community-based organizations and disabled people’s organizations in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Ellis has a Masters of Social Work and a Masters of Public Health from the Brown School at Washington University and a Bachelor’s degree in English and History from Oberlin College in Ohio. In his free time he is an active cyclist and a budding gardener.
Dr. Pam Begay’s work and her research interests include clinical social work practice, cultural identity, Indigenous knowledge, and issues surrounding Native women.
Dr. Begay is an Associate Professor of Practice and serves as the Director of the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies. She teaches in the mental health and American Indian/Alaska Native concentration and maintains a private practice focusing on trauma treatment and psychodynamic theory.
Dr. Begay is senior editor for the Journal of Indigenous Research, Clinical Social Work Journal-Editorial Board Member, Council on Social Work Education Commissioner-Commission on Diversity & Social and Economic Justice, North American Commissioner for the International Federation of Social Workers, and Board Member of the WashU Association of Women Faculty.
Dr. Begay is from the Diné Nation and was born in Shiprock, New Mexico. She received her PhD in clinical social work from Smith College, School for Social Work, her MSW from Washington University in St. Louis, and her BA from the University of New Mexico. Dr. Begay enjoys running and visiting national parks with her family in the summer.
Manasseh C. Begay serves as program manager for Social Workers Advancing through Grounded Education (SAGE). The program recruits, trains and financially supports Brown School MSW students who are interested in completing three credits of their practica in Indian Country and is facilitated by the Buder Center for American Indian Studies. He works collaboratively with the Office of Field Education.
While working out of the Shiprock, NM campus of Diné College, Begay assisted in building the social work program through collaboration and curriculum development that is currently in place. He taught and assisted in field placement, community social services and culture, and other introductory social work courses. Prior to his time at the Brown School, Begay wore many hats, spending time as a federal firefighter and as a San Juan County sheriff deputy.
Begay is originally from Cibecue, Arizona and is enrolled with the White Mountain Apache Tribe and is also Diné. Manasseh received his MSW from New Mexico Highlands University and his bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from the University of New Mexico.