Brown School

Can improved nutrition during pregnancy help prevent stunted growth in children around the world? With partners in Ecuador, Lora Iannotti studies the effects of maternal diet on infant brain development.

Alumna Patricia Saleeby helped develop and enhance the ICF, a classification system that enables better patient care around the world.

Social scientist Mark Rank, a nationally renowned expert on poverty, inequality and social justice, examines the role of chance and luck in our lives.

Sean Joe, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School, has been named a 2024-25 Institute for Economic Equity research fellow by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Students from WashU’s Brown School recently took their classroom lessons to the frontlines of local policy, offering public testimony on a bill aimed at expanding nontraditional housing options in St. Louis.

Husain Lateef, assistant professor at the Brown School, has been awarded a two-year, $49,821 grant from the Brady Education Foundation to study the influences of Afrocentric cultural strengths in Black youth education.

COVID-19 reshaped mobility patterns worldwide, affecting walking, driving and public transit use, finds a new study published in The Lancet Public Health. The research, led by an international team including some Brown School researchers, analyzed data from nearly 300 cities to understand how urban transportation habits adapted during the pandemic.

Cal J. Halvorsen, an associate professor at the Brown School, has been awarded a visiting scholar grant to spend 10 weeks at the renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in summer 2025.

Tyriesa L. Howard, an assistant professor at the Brown School, has received a 2024 Changemakers in Family Planning grant from the Society of Family Planning. The $84,000 grant will support her research project, which examines the impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on adolescents and young adults’ autonomy over their bodies.

The Brown School has ushered in a new era of social policy marked by key initiatives in social policy education, research and community engagement.