Janelle Barker Gibson’s career reflects 25 years of practice in human services and healthcare. Focusing on macro level interventions, Janelle’s career reflects the intersectionality of a social work career, centering community health and well-being, public policy, and organizational management.
Prior to joining the Brown School, Janelle had professional practice career spanning child welfare, policy practice as a registered lobbyist in Missouri and Illinois, foundation management, fund development, healthcare promotion and training, and board membership with organizations in both St. Louis, Missouri and Seattle, Washington. While spending several years working in the healthcare sector she focused on development, dissemination and training on disease state and pharmaceutical management protocols for medical professionals and administrators.
As an instructor since 2009, Professor Gibson has served as course lead for both Human Behavior in the Social Environment, as well as Social Work Practice with Organizations and Communities. She also teaches courses at the intersection of sociology, policy and economics. She serves as a frequent instructor for the Brown School’s Professional Development coursework in management and leadership. As such, she has been recognized twice for excellence in teaching and was honored to lecture at Fudan University in Shanghai, China on the topic of nonprofit management and social entrepreneurship.
Ms. Gibson is currently Special Advisor to the Dean, where she is focused on activities tied to accreditation and continuous quality improvement for the MSW Program. Previously, Janelle served as the Assistant Dean for the MSW Program. In this role she managed course scheduling, completed the self-study for the program’s reaccreditation efforts, and facilitated curriculum continuity through curriculum redesign efforts.
She is the author of Social, Economic, and Political Environments for Social Work Practice which was published in 2023 by Cognella Publishing. She is co-author of A Founder’s Story, a case study published in the Journal of Nonprofit Education and Leadership. She is also a reviewer for Voluntas International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Management, and a textbook reviewer for Pearson Publishing.
Since 2007, she has provided management consulting services for nonprofit organizations throughout St. Louis as Principal for ChangeMakers Consulting.
A two-time recipient of the Brown School’s Excellence in Teaching Award, Anna Goldfarb Shabsin is passionate about issues related to social welfare and their interplay with politics, advocacy, and policy. She serves as the Assistant Dean for the Master of Social Policy degree program and as Chair of the Policy Specialization. She also teaches classes in law and policy in Washington University’s Prison Education Project.
Shabsin oversees the university’s dual-degree JD/MSW program and serves as a faculty advisor for both MSP, MSW, and dual JD/MSW students. She is the university’s Safe Zone trainer for all faculty and staff.
Shabsin is also an independent consultant, having designed and facilitated workshops for many notable clients including Twain Financial and Kaiser Permanente. Prior to joining the Brown School, she practiced law for ten years.
Shenyang Guo is the author of numerous research articles in child welfare, child mental health services, welfare, and health care. He has expertise in applying advanced statistical models to solving social welfare problems and has taught graduate courses that address event history analysis, hierarchical linear modeling, growth curve modeling, propensity score analysis, and program evaluation. In addition, Guo serves on the editorial board of Social Service Review and as a frequent guest reviewer for journals seeking a critique of advanced methodological analyses.
Guo is a fellow of American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, and a fellow of Society of Social Work and Research. In addition, Guo serves on behalf of Washington University as the Assistant Vice Chancellor for International Affairs – Greater China, and as the McDonnell International Academy ambassador to China working with Fudan University.
Prior to joining the Brown School, Guo was director of the Applied Statistical Working Group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Jenni Harpring focuses on community-engaged teaching, creating collaborative learning environments, advising, and higher education administration. A winner of the Excellence in Advising award, she works intently working with students to achieve their goals.
Throughout her career in community engagement, she has held positions at a public health department, city housing department, and non-profit organizations. She has over 10 years of higher education experience in civic engagement, social work, and public health education.
Harpring draws on over 15 years of professional experiences at the intersection of large decision-making institutions and their surrounding communities to develop field education curriculum. She leads the field education curriculum and is engaged in training field instructors, supporting the field education team on curriculum design and development, and working directly with students in their field placements. In addition to field education, Harpring teaches community-based courses in both the social work and public health programs.
Harpring has appointments at Washington University beyond the Brown School through teaching and serving on various committees. She serves as assistant director of the Beyond Boundaries program which is designed to provide first year students the opportunity to explore topics – from climate change to aging to artificial intelligence – from multiple disciplinary perspectives.
Jenine Harris earned her doctorate in public health studies and biostatistics from Saint Louis University School of Public Health in 2008 and currently teaches biostatistics courses in the Brown School public health program. Her recent research interests focus on increasing diversity in data science and improving the quality of research in public health by using reproducible research practices throughout the research process. Jenine’s award-winning 2020 book, “Statistics with R: Solving Problems Using Real-World Data,” is an introductory statistics textbook published by Sage. The book combines statistical concepts with R coding and includes representation of women throughout as both characters and as authors of resources. Each chapter addresses a different social problem using a real-world data set.
Jenine is also an author on more than 90 peer-reviewed publications and developed and published the odds.n.ends R package available on the CRAN. In 2013, she authored “An Introduction to Exponential Random Graph Modeling,” which was published in the Sage Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences series, and was translated into Chinese, and is accompanied the ergmharris R package available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).
Jenine (Twitter: @jenineharris) is the co-leader of R-Ladies St. Louis, which she co-founded with Chelsea West in 2017 (Twitter: @rladiesstl). R-Ladies St. Louis is a local chapter of R-Ladies Global, an organization devoted to promoting gender diversity in the R community.
Jin Huang is the Irving Louis Horowitz Professor in Social Policy in the Brown School, the co-director of the Center for Social Development, and an internationally renowned expert in the development of social policies that support family and child well-being. His work centers on financial capability and asset building (FCAB) programs for disadvantaged populations, such as low-income children, children with disabilities, children of immigrants, and youth in transition to adulthood. Huang’s research aims for universal policies that offer financial capability and structured asset building for all.
Findings from Huang’s research have contributed to improvements in FCAB policies in the United States, Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, and elsewhere. His research has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including JAMA Pediatrics, the American Journal of Public Health, Social Science & Medicine, Social Service Review, and Social Science Research. In 2024, he was named to the Stanford University-Elsevier list of the World’s Top 2% of Scientists in social work.
Huang is a noted leader in the social work profession. A fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, he serves as a member of the board of directors of Influencing Social Policy and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Policy Practice and Research. He is also one of the network co-leads of the Grand Challenges for Social Work initiative’s Network to Build Financial Capability and Assets for All. Huang is active in the Society for Social Work and Research, the Council on Social Work Education, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, and the Financial Social Work Commission of the China Association for Social Work Education.
Huang began his career as a practitioner working with people with disabilities in the United States and China, and that work continues in his research on family-focused interventions.
Recent Media Coverage
What Trump Accounts might do for low-income St. Louisans
St. Louis Magazine, February 4, 2026
Trump lauds Visa’s move to use rewards for savings accounts
Bloomberg, January 28, 2026
What’s the best way to give America’s children $6 billion?
New York Times, December 9, 2025
Huang inducted into American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare
Center for Social Development. January 30, 2025
In China, a new tool for financial social work
Center for Social Development. May 16, 2024
Global conference connects social work, research and policy
Center for Social Development. December 19, 2023
Parents’ views of universal asset-building policies for children
Center for Social Development. December 7, 2023
Evidence, vision for Children’s Account policy at Singapore event
Center for Social Development. November 30, 2023