Brown School

Read the text of graduate student speaker Donald Gerke’s prepared remarks to the Class of 2018. Gerke received a doctorate from the Brown School.

Graduate student speaker Donald Gerke’s Commencement speech will focus on the importance of perseverance, finding strength to continue working in challenging times, and the importance of continuing to push for social justice throughout students’ lives.

The Brown School’s Najjuwah Walden, once of the system, aims to take on institutional violence as part of the system. Her post-graduate career will focus on reproductive and sexual health, particularly as it relates to institutional racism and economic stability.

A new suite of technology tools developed by David Patterson Silver Wolf, associate professor at the Brown School, aims to enable addiction and behavioral health professionals to monitor their own treatment services, as well as their patient’s recovery process, using data as their guide.

This spring, two teams comprised of multidisciplinary graduate students from the Brown School, Olin Business School and the School of Law took part in the first-ever Social Innovation Initiative, tackling the problem of infant mortality in St. Louis.

Aytakin Huseynli grew up in Azerbaijan. Seeing war and chaos around her, she knew she wanted to help others but didn’t know how to go about it. She eventually made her way to the Brown School, earned a master’s in social work and returned to her home country to establish the profession there. Today she is back on campus working toward a doctorate.

A new 115-page community-driven report on segregation and housing in St. Louis has been released by numerous local partners in the fields of public health, law, fair housing, and community development, including the Brown School’s For the Sake of All initiative.

With a unique skill, affection and affinity for working with older adults, Brown School PhD-candidate Cal Halvorson is making a career studying the relationship between work and aging.

Mark Rank, the Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at the Brown School, has developed a calculator that can determine for the first time an American’s expected risk of poverty based on their race, education level, gender, marital status and age. Here’s a video that explains how.

Washington University faculty and students will moderate panels at the Saint Louis Climate Summit, hosted by Saint Louis University. Students, faculty and staff can attend an evening with Bill Nye of “Science Guy” fame and environmentalist Carl Pope on April 23 for free by showing their IDs at the ticket booth.