Caitlin McMurtry (she/they) uses interdisciplinary theories and methods to examine the structural determinants of health and well-being in America, especially among historically oppressed groups. Her current research focuses on the magnitude of political polarization during disease outbreaks, the structural origins of (dis)trust in government and its relationship to gun ownership and medical distrust, and the role of ballot initiatives in health policy and politics. Broadly, her research seeks to understand how public opinion, politics, and government affect health inequities (and vice versa) in the U.S.
McMurtry’s experience working with officials at all levels of government sharpened her focus on the need for timely, actionable research that is accessible to policymakers and the public. From 2009-2013, she conducted public health research and translated findings for Kansas legislators in Topeka and helped to establish, fund, and run a community health coalition for the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas. Later, she interned for a member of the U.S. Senate and joined a team of researchers conducting rapid-response survey research during the COVID-19 pandemic for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under the Trump and Biden administrations.
McMurtry’s research has appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, Annals of Family Medicine, Health Affairs, and Milbank Quarterly, and it has received coverage in news outlets such as the Washington Post and NPR. McMurtry teaches courses on social work, health policy, and gun violence, and in 2024, McMurtry received the Teaching Excellence Award for Full-Time Faculty at the Brown School. She also co-leads the Medical School’s Advocacy and Global Health EXPLORE Pathway and co-instructs a course on Infectious Diseases and Health Equity. McMurtry is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Advancing Health Services, Policy & Economics Research (CAHSPER) and the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2), where she was a Spring 2025 Faculty Fellow and the inaugural recipient of the Adrienne Davis Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Community Engagement in 2026.
Dr. Molly W. Metzger serves as chair for the Domestic Social and Economic Development concentration within the Master of Social Work program. She is also a faculty director at the Center for Social Development, and a faculty fellow at the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement. Metzger’s research focuses on local, state, and federal housing policies, examining how these policies often reproduce patterns of inequity. She strives to build and share research with a host of community partners, in order to move housing policy toward the goals of racial and economic justice.
Metzger’s major projects have included a community-based participatory research project on public housing preservation in Chicago, a national analysis of the “Section 8” Housing Choice Voucher program, and a collaboration with the St. Louis Housing Authority, in which she and her team interviewed Section 8 renters about their housing experiences. Her edited book, Facing Segregation, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.
Metzger completed a BA in Women’s Studies from Carleton College and a PhD in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University. She serves as a board member at DeSales Community Development and the World Community Center, and is an active member of the Mann Elementary School PTO and St. Louis Public Schools’ Parent Action Council.
Nancy Morrow-Howell is an international leader in gerontology, known for her work on productive engagement of older adults. Her research contributes to knowledge about programs, policies and organizational arrangements that maximize the productive engagement of older adults while promoting positive outcomes for the individuals themselves. Her research documents outcomes for individual, families, and communities associated with work, volunteering, and caregiving by older adults. Her interests include the development of the Next Move initiative, now a part of WashU for Life, where older adults are facilitated in transitions to new roles in employment, volunteering or education.
At the Brown School, Morrow-Howell teaches gerontology courses. She also teaches a freshman course on aging, aimed at increasing young people’s understanding about long life and the need for social transformation. She directed the university’s Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging from 2012 to 2026 and continues to serve as Senior Advisor to the Center.
She has received Washington University Distinguished Faculty Award and the Brown School’s Outstanding Faculty Award. In 2008 and 2011, she was given the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award by Washington University. She was the recipient of the 2011 Career Achievement Award from the Association for Gerontology Education in Social Work and of the 2013 Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Social Work and Research.
Dr. Morrow-Howell is past president and fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. She is a member of that organization’s national advisory committee for The National Center to Reframe Aging well as the Age-Inclusive University Workgroup. She was awarded the Maxwell A. Pollack Award for Contributions to Health Aging and the Barbara Berkman Award for Outstanding Interdisciplinary Research, Practice or Policy, both from the Gerontological Society of America.
Mitra Naseh is a forced migration scholar, currently serving as an Assistant Professor and the Founding Director of the Forced Migration Initiative (FMI) at the Brown School, Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on the multidimensional social and economic integration of forcibly displaced populations, shaped by her interdisciplinary academic training, lived experience as an immigrant, and extensive fieldwork with non-governmental organizations and United Nations agencies, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia.
Naseh is the co-author of the widely recognized book Best Practices in Social Work with Refugees and Immigrants, published by Columbia University Press in 2019. Her emerging body of research has been supported by foundations and federal agencies, including the Russell Sage Foundation and the Missouri Foundation for Health. In the U.S., her recent work explores structural barriers that refugees face in accessing initial services as newly arrived Missourians and involves co-designing community-led solutions to address these barriers. Internationally, she is leading a study in Türkiye that evaluates the implementation outcomes and preliminary impacts of a combined low-intensity psychological intervention and cash assistance program on stress and anxiety among Afghan asylum seekers in Kayseri.
In addition to her research, Naseh is actively engaged in academic service. She currently co-chairs the Immigrants and Refugees Cluster of the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) and previously served on the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM). Her community engagement includes serving on the Advisory Board of the International Institute Community Development Corporation (IICDC) and formerly as an Executive Committee Member of the Immigrant Service Providers Network (ISPN) in St. Louis.
As an environmental gerontologist, Sojung Park studies how housing and neighborhood environments shape aging in place among older adults, with particular attention to those who are most vulnerable: those who are low-income, cognitively impaired, and living alone. Building on a person–environment fit framework, she conceptualizes aging in place not as a function of individual health or service supply alone, but as the outcome of a dynamic fit across the economic, service, social, and spatial dimensions of where older adults live.
A central thread of Park’s work concerns housing as a platform for healthy aging. Her longitudinal and review studies examine how subsidized and supportive senior housing relates to older residents’ health, cognitive function, support access, and well-being across the life course, showing, for example, how social engagement and neighborhood cohesion help explain the link between subsidized housing and cognitive function, and how community-based housing type shapes end-of-life resources and where older adults ultimately die.
A second thread turns to the neighborhood and community environment. Park investigates how the social, physical, and service characteristics of neighborhoods, including geographic access to local resources, enable or constrain support, participation, and aging in place. Her cross-national and cross-cultural studies compare age-friendly environments and community-based care arrangements across the United States and Korea, examining why supports and services that are available to some older adults remain inaccessible or unused for others.
Across this work, Park increasingly considers how housing and community settings can coordinate and connect older adults to support, pointing toward community-based models of care that strengthen equitable aging in place.
Current Work
Park’s current work extends this research program in two directions. The first is a book project on alternative housing communities in Korea, grounded in direct site visits and interviews. Following people across the life course (young adults in housing cooperatives, older adults in cohousing and care-oriented housing, identity-based communities, and village- and neighborhood-anchored housing), the project asks when living together becomes solidarity and when it becomes a survival strategy, how care is distributed, and whether such communities supplement public systems or quietly absorb what those systems leave undone. Anchored in frameworks of the social reproduction of housing, the solidarity of precarity, and housing as commons, it brings a qualitative, place-based lens to the same questions Park studies quantitatively in the United States, and lays the groundwork for forthcoming English-language scholarship.
The second extends Park’s person–environment fit framework to aging with and into disability. This emerging line of work examines how middle-aged and older adults with disabilities experience fit and misfit across the multiple domains of their environments, with particular attention to the service divide between aging-services and disability-services systems, where eligibility rules, institutional missions, and categorical classifications can leave people fully served by neither. A scoping review and a complementary qualitative study consider how this divide is experienced differently depending on disability timing, that is, by those aging with a long-standing disability versus those aging into disability in later life.
Park is on a leave of absence.
Byron aims to improve health and social services by advancing implementation science. His scholarship has contributed to the development, specification, tailoring, and evaluation of implementation strategies, as well as methods for studying implementation processes, mechanisms, and outcomes. Through international and interdisciplinary collaborations, he has helped grow implementation science and its application across diverse health and social service systems.
Byron is a Professor and Associate Dean for Research at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU), where he co-directs the Center for Mental Health Services Research. He holds secondary appointments in WashU’s Bursky School of Public Health and the School of Medicine, and serves as an Adjunct Professor of Public Health at University College Cork, Ireland.
Supported primarily by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), he has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and other scholarly works. His research has helped shape widely used frameworks, methods, measures, and reporting standards for implementation research. He has been recognized as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher and one of Stanford University–Elsevier’s World’s Top 2% Scientists. His honors include a Fulbright Specialist Award, WashU’s Provost’s Research Excellence Award, and the Early Career Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Dissemination and Implementation Special Interest Group.
Byron is committed to building capacity in implementation science through teaching, mentorship, and international collaboration. He teaches the doctoral-level course Developing and Evaluating Implementation Strategies in Health and Social Services and has mentored doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty members from around the world. He co-directs the Brown School’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded Training Program in Mental Health Services Research and serves as Director of the NIMH-funded Implementation Research Institute. He also serves as faculty for several national and international implementation science training programs, helping prepare researchers to conduct rigorous implementation research and improve health and social care across diverse settings.
He has contributed to the growth and leadership of the field through sustained professional service. He is a former President of the Society for Implementation Research Collaboration, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Implementation Research and Practice, a member of the editorial board of Implementation Science, and a standing member of the NIH Science of Implementation in Health and Healthcare Study Section. Across his research, mentorship, and professional leadership, Byron is committed to strengthening implementation science and supporting the use of evidence to improve health and social care.