Angelique Day and Meghan Romanelli, UW School of Social Work faculty members, will be honored by the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) for their outstanding contributions to research that informs anti-oppressive, anti-racist and socially just practices and policies. The awards will be presented January 14, 2023, during the 27th annual SSWR conference in Phoenix, Ariz.
Angelique Day, associate professor, was selected for the Social Policy Researcher Award in the emerging scholar category. The award, instituted in 2016, recognizes individuals who have made notable research contributions that influence the direction, design or implementation of social policy, impacting marginalized and oppressed populations. This is the first time a researcher from the UW School of Social Work will receive this prestigious award.
Day, who joined the School of Social Work faculty in 2017, is an expert in the field of foster care youth and child well-being, and has several research projects underway. One is to study the effects that foster, adoptive and kinship parent-training intervention has on the stability and permanency of teenage placements. Another is to determine whether targeted college access and retention programs can help students with foster care histories successfully complete post-secondary education.
Meghan B. Romanelli, assistant professor, will receive an honorable mention in the Excellence in Research Award category. This award recognizes the best original peer-reviewed scholarly contributions in a given year that have direct application to practice, policies and the resolution of social issues. Romanelli and her colleagues were cited for their work on “Factors Associated with Distinct Patterns of Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Plans, and Suicide Attempts among U.S. Adolescents.”
Romanelli’s research interests center on the factors that lead to mental health disparities among LGBTQ communities. Before joining the School of Social Work in 2020, she was a pre- and postdoctoral research fellow at the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at New York University, where she earned her PhD in 2019.
SSWR, begun in 1994 to advance social work research, has a membership of 1,900, which includes faculty in schools of social work and other professional schools, research staff in public and private agencies, and masters/doctoral students.