Jordan P. Davis, Ph.D., is Professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. He comes to WashU from the RAND Corporation, where he served as Senior Policy Researcher, and previously held a faculty appointment at the University of Southern California’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. He received his Ph.D. in Social Work from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017.
Dr. Davis leads a nationally recognized, extramurally funded research program at the intersection of trauma and substance use disorders. His work focuses on the etiology and treatment of PTSD, alcohol and other substance use disorders, and co-occurring psychiatric conditions, with particular emphasis on individuals historically underserved by existing systems of care. He integrates ecological momentary assessment, wearable biometric sensing, machine learning, and advanced longitudinal modeling to understand how trauma and stress shape behavioral health, and to identify when and how to intervene most effectively.
His intervention science includes randomized controlled trials of mobile health tools targeting co-occurring PTSD and substance use, and his policy-facing work at RAND has reached federal lawmakers and veteran-serving organizations nationwide. Dr. Davis has received extramural funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and several private foundations, and holds editorial roles at several leading journals, including Deputy Editor of Stress and Health and Associate Editor of Addictive Behaviors. He has served as Chair of APA Division 50’s Collaborative Perspectives on Addiction conference for four years and will direct a NIDA-funded T32 training program at WashU.
Jennifer Bellamy is a social worker with expertise in fathering, child maltreatment prevention, and child welfare. She is currently a Professor and Director of the Evaluation Center at the WashU Brown School of Social Work.
She earned her PhD from Columbia University in New York and her MSSW from the University of Texas at Austin. Bellamy’s practice experience includes clinical work in university mental health services and project coordination for the Texas Fragile Families Initiative, a multisite demonstration project serving young, unmarried, low-income fathers. Before coming to the Brown School, Bellamy held a faculty position in social work at the University of Denver (DU) where she also served as Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs for DU.
Her current work focuses on the engagement of fathers in child and family services by implementing family and system-level interventions. Bellamy is a co-developer of the Dads Matter-HV intervention, recognized by the California Evidence Based Clearinghouse as “Supported by Research Evidence”, and the Nurturing Dads and Partners (NDAP) program. She is a member of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.
Bellamy currently teaches Social Work Practice with Individuals, Families, and Groups.
Sarah Font is an interdisciplinary researcher examining the impacts of the child welfare system and the criminal and juvenile legal systems on children and families. Her research primarily involves partnerships with state and local public agencies and the use of linked administrative data to inform agencies’ strengths, challenges, and priorities for reform. Her work is funded by the National Institutes of Health and Arnold Ventures.
Sarah started out as a Child Protective Services caseworker in 2008, where she investigated allegations of child abuse and neglect. This experience sparked an interest in how systems can better serve and protect children. She went on to earn her PhD in Social Welfare from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2014 and then completed a NICHD postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin. She spent nine years as faculty at Penn State University as part of the Child Maltreatment Solutions Network, earning tenure in the Department of Sociology and Criminology in 2021. She joined the Brown School in 2025.
Cal J. Halvorsen is a gerontological social work scholar whose work is at the confluence of aging societies, paid and unpaid work, and social purpose. He has expertise on self-employment, job-training programs, volunteering in later life, and intergenerational initiatives, with his work cited in both academic and public spheres.
His scholarship has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals in gerontology, social work, and public health, and his op-eds have been published in The Conversation, Fast Company, Forbes, and Next Avenue. His insights on older workers have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, BBC, and more. Cal’s research has been supported by the U.S. Social Security Administration, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, National Institutes of Health, and AARP. In recognition of his contributions, he was named a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, the society’s highest category of membership.
Cal has ongoing collaborations with social purpose organizations to evaluate the impact of their work and build internal research and evaluation capacity. These include CoGenerate, which advances multigenerational solutions to social problems, and the Treehouse Foundation, which develops intergenerational communities that support children in the child welfare system. He has advised national research initiatives to benefit older worker and volunteer programs within the U.S. Department of Labor and AmeriCorps Seniors.
At WashU, Cal is an associate professor and assistant dean for faculty affairs at the Brown School, a secondary faculty member at the School of Public Health, and co-director of the Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging. He is also a project lead and investigator at the Center for Work, Health, and Well-being at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a faculty affiliate at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Cal was formerly an assistant professor at the Boston College School of Social Work.
Paz Galupo (they/them) is the Audre Lorde Distinguished Professor for Sexual Health & Education. Paz is the director of the Sexuality, Health, and Gender (SHAG) Center.
Paz’s research interests focus on the intersection of sexual orientation and gender identity, with a particular focus on understanding nonbinary expressions of bisexual and trans experience. Paz’s long-standing research program centers those most marginalized in the LGBTQ+ community (i.e., transgender, bisexual, and LGBTQ+ Black, Indigenous, and People of Color [BIPOC]). Prior to joining the Brown School, Paz served as Professor of Psychology at Towson University.
Paz is Editor-in-Chief for two academic journals: Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, the official journal for Division 44 of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Journal of Bisexuality. Paz currently serves as the co-chair for the APA Task Force developing Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Transgender and Gender Diverse Adults.
Theresa Anasti is an organizational scholar and social worker who focuses on understanding the role of nonprofit and community-based organizations in bettering the conditions for underrepresented populations. She is especially interested in the role of such organizations in working with and for “unpopular” and criminalized populations stigmatized by wider society, including sex workers, active drug users, and the unhoused.
Her qualitative work asks several questions important for the consideration of organizations that provide human services and advocate for underrepresented populations. First, how are people with lived experience included in the design and implementation of services that are meant to improve their lives? Second, how do leaders of mutual aid and grassroots organizations (particularly those made up of people with lived experience) contend with the tensions between their radical support work and the realities of nonprofit work? Third, how do frontline service providers, as street level bureaucrats, actually think about, and provide services to unpopular populations? At stake is a practical question for the field: how can we best provide anti-carceral, trauma-informed human services and resources to populations that are themselves marginalized within the field of social work?
Past work has included a large-scale qualitative project of relationships between mainstream human service nonprofits and a sex workers’ rights organization, highlighting the need for professionalization and the complexities of inter-organizational collaboration for organizations in policy fields that may be perceived as controversial. Emerging work includes a qualitative study of individuals working at syringe service programs (SSPs), and how they have adapted to changes in the field’s political and funding environments.
Prior to her role at the Brown School, Dr. Anasti was an Associate Professor of Social Work and BSW Program Director at Oakland University in Rochester, MI. She is an avid harm reductionist.