Click here for more information on The Politics of Well-Being, a full year of programming in collaboration with the School of Social Policy & Practice.



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Join us for the final session in the Politics of Well-Being series, exploring health. From mental health to public health systems, the panel will explore how health policy reflects our political priorities and ethical commitments. With interdisciplinary voices from social work, public health, and policy, this conversation will assess the challenges and innovations shaping health equity today.

Can't join in person? Watch the livestream here.

Join us after the final session to celebrate the close of the Politics of Well-Being series. A reception with refreshments will follow from 6:00–7:00 PM in the same location.

With Jacqueline Corcoran, Meredith Doherty & Jennifer Prah

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Speaker Biographies:

Jacqueline Corcoran has been a Masters level social worker for over 25 years and has enjoyed 20 years of productive academic scholarship, starting out at the University of Texas at Arlington (4 years), then Virginia Commonwealth University (17 years), and now the University of Pennsylvania. In that time, Dr. Corcoran has written 18 books and over 100 journal articles and book chapters. She was the first person in social work to publish a book on evidence-based practice, Evidence-Based Social Work Practice with Families, which she wrote in 2000 as an assistant professor.

Dr. Corcoran’s career has been devoted to the synthesis of clinical social work knowledge through systematic reviews, meta-analysis, and meta-synthesis. With Littell and Pillai, she published the first book in social work on systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Another area of clinical scholarship is strengths-based models, including solution-focused therapy, motivational interviewing, strengths-based assessment, and ways to make existing models more strengths-based. Dr. Corcoran is committed to continuing the compilation of knowledge to further the evidence basis of social work with the mission of bringing relevant services to oppressed and vulnerable people.

Meredith Doherty conducts mixed-method, community-engaged research to understand the relationship between economic security and health. She examines the process through which medical financial hardship accelerates existing racial and ethnic health disparities. Dr. Doherty draws upon her clinical experience as a palliative care social worker in safety-net community hospitals to develop, implement, and evaluate healthcare-based social needs interventions that target downstream social determinants of health in medically underserved populations. As an implementation scientist, she seeks to understand the role of community and organizational leaders in the delivery of evidence-based strategies to promote healthcare access, address health-related social needs, and reduce cancer health disparities.

Dr. Doherty received her MSW from the Silver School of Social Work at New York University, her PhD in Social Welfare from the CUNY Graduate Center, and was Co-Chief Research Fellow in Psycho-Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Doherty is a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and faculty at both the Center for Guaranteed Income Research and the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation. She is lead investigator of the Guaranteed Income and Financial Treatment Trial (G.I.F.T.T.), the first randomized control trial of guaranteed income in the U.S. to focus on alleviating financial hardship in families facing cancer. At SP2, Dr. Doherty teaches courses in health policy and social work/nonprofit leadership.
 

Jennifer J. Prah is a leading global scholar of domestic and global health policy and public health.  She conducts theoretical and empirical studies of health equity to address global and national health inequities, especially among women and children. Professor Prah founded and directs the Health Equity and Policy Lab (HEPL), a mixed methods lab that studies public health and health and social policy issues such as the equity and efficiency of health system access, financing, resource allocation, policy reform, and the social determinants of health. Her research is conducted internationally and nationally, including work in Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Malaysia, Morocco, South Korea, South Africa, Taiwan, the United States, and Vietnam.

Professor Prah received a bachelor’s degree from the University of California-Berkeley, master’s degrees from Oxford University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Yale University, and a doctoral degree from Harvard University.  She is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Hastings Center Fellow, a Greenwall Faculty Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Donaghue Investigator.