NYU Silver School of Social Work

Graduate Student Association President Eric Pratt, MSW ’23, was born and raised in rural Maine. His long-term goal is to start an organization for LGBTQ youth in his home community – an organization he wished he’d had growing up. Eric will be gaining critical skills to help him in that quest through his Field placement this year at the Ali Forney Center, the nation’s largest non-profit providing shelter and comprehensive support services to homeless LGBTQ young people.

As an undergraduate psychology student at Nigeria’s Covenant University, Ololade Oketunbi came to see that her fellow citizens accepted mental health professionals little and understood them less. “There is a dearth of mental health professionals in the community, and people don’t trust their work,” she said. With her MSW from NYU Silver under her belt, she is now gaining clinical experience in Washington, DC with the goal of returning to Nigeria with skills and knowledge in mental health care to help bridge the societal divide.

While earning his degree at Silver, Michael Sanders (front row center), MSW ’19—father, army veteran, and entrepreneur—was the vice president of the NYU Military Alliance, an NYU Social Sector Leadership Diversity Fellow, a Silver Student Leadership Council Fellow, a member of the Students of Color Collective, and one of two students on the School’s Social Justice Praxis Committee. Michael, who is now a Social Service Advocate at the Committee for Public Counsel Services in Boston, observed, “Being a social worker means fighting for social justice and never forgetting our responsibility to our clients, to ourselves, and to society as a whole.”

Among those at highest risk for exposure to COVID-19 is the large population of frontline essential workers in lower status occupations, in which Black and Latino people are overrepresented. These workers, however, experience serious multi-level impediments to COVID-19 testing. As part of the National Institutes of Health’s RADx® initiative, a multidisciplinary research team led by Professor and Associate Dean for Research Marya Gwadz is using an engineering-inspired framework called the multiphase optimization strategy (MOST) to optimize an intervention to increase regular COVID-19 testing for these workers.

Professor Michelle R. Munson has made it her mission to help the mental health system better respond to marginalized young adults whose mental health challenges, if left untreated, impede their ability to form relationships, hold jobs, live independently, and function well in society.