SSW welcomes three new faculty members
The School of Social Work is excited to welcome professors Marti DeLiema, Hannah MacDougall and Jihee Woo as tenure track faculty beginning August, 2022.
As an interdisciplary gerontologist, Dr. DeLiema defines successful aging as maintaining good health, cultivating meaningful social relationships, and being financially secure. Her work focuses on identifying the extent and cost of financial fraud in the US, as well as the factors related to financial victimization. She has experience in both quantitative and qualitative research methods having led focus groups, published case studies, and analyzed longitudinal data with tens of thousands of respondents. Dr. DeLiema’s goal is to generate and test novel interventions that protect consumers from financial victimization, in addition to understanding the factors that make some people more vulnerable to scams than others.
She shares: “My goals for this position are to deepen my relationships with SSW faculty, mentor graduate students who are interested in careers in aging, and to further my research on financial crime prevention and elder justice.”
Dr. MacDougall’s research interests pertain to health policy and the role of health systems in addressing social needs of communities. Specifically, she studies nonprofit hospital community benefit policy and its potential to promote health equity. The goal of her research is to identify policy revision that redirects resources to directly benefit community-identified needs with particular focus on communities that have been historically and systematically oppressed. Her research projects have an added focus on geographic context and the unique strengths and challenges of rural areas.
She is “thrilled to be joining the U of MN School of Social Work and is eager to collaborate with faculty, students, and staff to produce meaningful research and teach courses that are engaging, challenging and relevant.”
Ms. Woo is a social work researcher with a background in working directly with children and families living in poverty, as well as in conducting anti-poverty policy research and community-based research with low-wage workers. Her diverse educational and work experiences have shaped research interests including poverty, low-wage work, and health. Specifically, her scholarly inquiries focus on the impact of material hardships on worker health; the contribution of job quality to health disparities; and social and economic determinants of mental health in later life.
She shares: “There couldn’t be a better setting for my research than the Twin Cities, where I would like to delve into racial/ethnic disparities in job quality that in turn lead to health disparities among health care workers. Given the demographic diversity of the Twin Cities and the primacy of its healthcare sector, I see many great opportunities to collaborate with a diverse workforce and communities for my future research projects.“
The SSW looks forward to these wonderful additions to our faculty!