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.
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.
Dr. Sheretta T. Butler-Barnes is Professor and Dean’s Distinguished Professorial Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) Brown School of Social Work, with affiliations in African and African American Studies and the Division of Data and Computational Sciences. She is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Biomedical Data Science at Meharry Medical College, advancing an integrated program of research at the intersection of developmental science, population health, and computational analytics.
A developmental psychologist, Dr. Butler-Barnes investigates how racialized stress exposures, including interpersonal racism, vicarious exposure to racial violence, and social media-based experiences shape and culturally grounded coping processes shape developmental and health trajectories among Black youth and families. Her work centers family systems as critical contexts through which risk and resilience processes unfold, linking early life experiences to well-being, educational outcomes, and risky behaviors, as well as chronic disease risk across the life course.
Her research program is organized around two integrated areas:
1) Black Families, Racialized Stress, and Developmental Health
This line of work examines how racialized stress exposures and protective family processes, including racial socialization and coping self-efficacy, influence Black Americans well-being, educational outcomes, and risky behaviors, with particular attention to Black women and girls’ development. This research advances culturally responsive, developmentally grounded models that account for both vulnerability and resilience within family, school, and community contexts.
2) Cardiovascular Health and Structural Inequities
This emerging line of research builds on her prior work on racial stress and coping to examine how structural racism and chronic psychosocial stress contribute to cardiovascular risk, including hypertension and congestive heart failure, among Black populations. Her work emphasizes the role of stress physiology, coping mechanisms, and social determinants in shaping long-term health disparities.
Across both areas, Dr. Butler-Barnes leverages biomedical data science approaches—including advanced statistical modeling and population health analytics—to examine multilevel pathways linking social experiences to health outcomes. Her work aims to inform interventions and policies that reduce disparities and promote health equity across the lifespan.
She previously served as the Inaugural Sojourner Truth Visiting Professor of Racial and Social Justice at Rutgers University School of Social Work (2023–24). Dr. Butler-Barnes earned her PhD and MA in psychology from Wayne State University and her BS in psychology from Michigan State University.
Leopoldo J. Cabassa, MSW, Ph.D. is a Puerto Rican social worker. He is the Co-Director of the Center for Mental Health Services Research at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work and the Co-Director of the Center for Holistic Interdisciplinary Research in Psychedelics at Washington University in St. Louis.
His research centers on examining physical and mental health inequities in historically marginalized racial and ethnic populations with serious mental illness (SMI; e.g., schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder). His work blends quantitative and qualitative methods, health disparities research, community engagement, intervention research, and implementation science.
His research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the New York State Office of Mental Health, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, SAMHSA, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Cabassa is a fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research.
His book Addressing Health Inequities in People with Serious Mental Illness: A Call to Action won the 2025 Society for Social Work and Research Book Award. His scholarship is making significant contributions in four areas:1) improving depression literacy and reducing stigma toward mental illness in the Latino community; 2) reducing physical health inequities in racial/ethnic minoritized and historically marginalized communities with SMI; 3) improving the health and well-being of young adults experiencing first-episode psychosis; and 4) studying the implementation of psychedelic-assisted therapies in routine practice settings.
His long-term career goals are to establish a program of research and training that focuses on understanding the factors that fuel inequities in health and mental health care and use this knowledge to inform the development and implementation of interventions to reduce disparities.
Brett Drake researches matters of child welfare with a focus on early intervention cases of child neglect as well as the connections between socio-environmental conditions and child neglect. His current research analyzes census and child protective data to assess the efficacy of protective and preventative services.
His research and his many years of child welfare practice, at the direct and clinical levels, inform the master’s-level courses he teaches at the Brown School. The topics of these classes range from diversity and human behavior to analysis of practice.
In addition, Drake teaches doctoral classes on research methodology, due to his interest in the philosophical and theoretical aspects of social work research. He also consults with a number of state and local agencies regarding evaluation and administrative data.
Alexis Duncan’s research focuses on risk mechanisms and psychiatric comorbidity of obesity, eating disorders and substance use disorders, particularly among women. Her additional research interests include nosology (the study of diagnostic criteria) of psychiatric disorders, the effects of child maltreatment, and differences in psychopathology by race, gender and sexual orientation.
As a psychiatric epidemiologist with training in behavior genetics, Duncan takes a transdisciplinary approach in her scholarship, recognizing that the traditional disciplinary boundaries often hinder achievement of a comprehensive understanding of disease etiology and, therefore, inhibit the development of effective treatments and interventions. She has collaborated with scientists from diverse disciplines to explore risk factors from human genetics and gut microbes to family and social environment, and often uses data from genetically informative, longitudinal study designs.
Duncan completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology and behavior genetics in the Department of Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine.