L. Patty Flores is a bilingual therapist, researcher, and public scholar whose work bridges clinical practice, research, and advocacy. Her research focuses on system-impacted youth, trauma, and how child-serving systems shape the lives of immigrant and foster youth. She has been featured by SAGE Publications, The Imprint, NBC4, LAist, Univision, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Field Center, where her scholarship and lived experience have contributed to national conversations on child welfare, youth voice, and culturally responsive practice. As a scholar-practitioner, Patty integrates professional expertise with her lived experience as a former foster youth to inform her research and advocacy. Through her work, she aims to advance policies and practices that strengthen outcomes for children, youth, and families.

Bethanie Saint Louis is a first-year doctoral student at the Brown School whose upbringing in Haiti shaped her commitment to poverty reduction and community-driven development. She brings a background of graduate education and over a decade of professional experience spanning international development and social work. Her research examines how community asset building and participatory, locally driven approaches can reduce poverty and mitigate aid dependency in developing nations. She is particularly interested in how public policy and high-level initiatives within the U.S. government and the international development sector can support sustainable, locally led solutions. Through her scholarship, Bethanie aims to inform international social work policy and practice that creates lasting, community-owned change.

Stella’s work employs participatory and community-engaged approaches to explore (a) how stigma and structural power shape health and resilience among historically excluded individuals and communities, and (b) how that knowledge can be translated into more just interventions.

Stella’s clinical and research experience focuses on sex workers and survivors of trafficking in the sex industry, queer and trans individuals, provision of gender-affirming healthcare, young adult cancer survivors, and harm reduction related to substance use.

Before joining the Brown School PhD program, Stella earned bachelors degrees in Psychology and Philosophy from Fordham University and a masters degree in Counseling Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Zeyi Wu is a PhD student at Brown School. She earned bachelor’s degrees in both Social Work and Economics from Nankai University and received her Master of Social Work from the Brown School. After graduation, she worked for seven years in a subsidized senior housing community in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she provided supportive services to older adults from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. She has been a Licensed Clinical Social Worker since 2024. Her research interests focus on social and environmental factors that influence the health and well-being of older adults.

She is particularly interested in social engagement in later life and its impact on mental and physical health as well as the role of social services and evidence-based interventions in promoting well-being and supporting aging in place. In her free time, she enjoys kayaking.

Liz holds an MSW from the Brown School with a concentration in Mental Health and a specialization in Older Adults & Aging Societies. Her professional background is grounded in direct care and community-based support, with experience in residential settings supporting adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities across the life course. Her work is rooted in the belief that dignity, clarity, and a little bit of humor can coexist, even in the hardest conversations. She hopes that her work helps shift how we think about aging and care: that aging is not a disability, caregiving is essential work, and resilience is a skill that can be taught before loss forces us to learn it.

Ziming Wang received his MSW from the Columbia University School of Social Work, with a specialization in Policy Practice and Aging. Before joining the Brown School, he worked on policy and systems-level implementation research at Peking University, focusing on digital therapeutics and chronic disease risk management. His field experiences as a strategy manager across health and technology organizations informed his commitment to accelerating the translation of evidence-based interventions to address end users complex needs and improve population health. At WashU, Ziming aims to systematically learn dissemination and implementation research and explore methods that advance understanding of long life while supporting healthy and productive aging.