NYU Silver School of Social Work

At NYU Silver’s Class of 2022 convocation ceremony, Nadine Raia led the academic procession, carrying the school banner into the historic United Palace theater. One month later, she was already fulfilling her dream as a therapist at New York Center for Living, working with adolescents and young adults with substance use and co-occurring mental health issues. She has come a long way since she entered Silver’s 16-month MSW degree pathway in January 2021, three decades after she earned her undergraduate degree in journalism.

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.