Edward F. Lawlor, Ph.D., dean of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, has been appointed the inaugural William E. Gordon Professor, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton announced.
“Edward Lawlor is a distinguished academic leader and contributor to the advance of social work education and scholarship,” Wrighton said. “An expert in health-care policy related to the aging population, an active leader in community issues and the leader of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Dean Lawlor is the ideal person to be the inaugural holder of the William E. Gordon Professorship.”
The installation will be Oct. 5 in Holmes Lounge.
Lawlor became GWB dean July 1. His research focuses on access to health care, hospital reimbursement policy, health insurance, the health-care work force, and Medicare and Medicaid policy.
Lawlor is the founding editor of the Public Policy and Aging Report, a quarterly journal on policy and research in an aging society, and is the author of Redesigning the Medicare Contract: Politics, Markets, and Agency, which looks at Medicare as a social contract between society at large and its most vulnerable citizens.
Before GWB, Lawlor was dean of the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. He also served on the faculty of the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, and was a senior scholar at the McLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.
From 1990-98, he was director of the Center for Health Administration Studies and the Graduate Program in Health Administration and Policy. He directed the University of Chicago/American International Health Alliance program in health management and policy in Romania.
Lawlor has been engaged in community organizations as well as urban, state and national policy initiatives. In Chicago, he was a member and secretary of the Chicago Board of Health for 10 years. He chaired statewide commissions and task forces on health policy in Illinois for three governors.
He has served as a director for research and service organizations in child welfare, aging, HIV and AIDS services, health services and hospice, and employment and aging. He is on the boards of the National Organization for Research at the University of Chicago and the National Center on Women and Aging.
Lawlor earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, government and legal studies from Bowdoin College. Before earning a doctorate from the Florence Heller Graduate School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare at Brandeis University, he was a research associate at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Lawlor’s professorship is named in honor of William Gordon, professor in the School of Social Work from 1951-1978.
In 1951, Dean Benjamin Youngdahl recruited Gordon to establish one of the nation’s first doctoral programs in social work. Gordon awarded the University’s first doctorate in social work to Sidney E. Zimbalist in 1955.
In 1977, Gordon received a Distinguished Faculty Award from the University, and in the same year he received the first Richard Lodge Prize of the Adelphi University School of Social Work for his contributions to the development of social work theory and for the enhancement of professional practice.
Gordon was an officer of the National Association of Social Workers, and in 1978 the organization honored him with its Resolution of Appreciation.
He was named professor emeritus in 1978.