NYU Silver School of Social Work

Robert Aviles, MSW ’22, is one of six NYU Silver students in the 2021-22 cohort of NYU’s Social Sector Leadership Diversity Fellowship (SSLD), an 18-month leadership development program for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) graduate students across the University. In the MSW program, Robert’s focus is on clinical social work with a social justice and anti-oppressive perspective. He is passionate about examining the links between policies and practice and how they impact historically marginalized communities. Says Robert, “The ways in which you can intersect your learning and experiences between both the SSLD program and education here at NYU Silver truly distinguishes you and sets you ahead.”

Her own experience with early stage melanoma in her mid-20s led Meredith Ruden, MSW ’09/DSW ’18, to leave a burgeoning career in advertising sales to pursue oncology social work. Today, she is putting her NYU Silver education to work as the Clinical Director of a Manhattan group practice and as the Founder and President of The Feather Foundation, which provides online emotional, financial, and practical support for parents with cancer.

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.