Mary-Ellen Brown, Ph.D., is the Josleen and Frances Lockhart Memorial Fellow for Direct Practice in Social Work and an associate professor at the Steve Hicks School of Social Work. Dr. Brown’s scholarship examines social determinants of health, health equity, toxic stress, and trauma as related to the resiliency, health, and well-being of minoritized and historically-excluded communities. Dr. Brown’s uses community-based participatory research, prevention science, and implementation science to test interventions and examine determinants of health embedded in components of equitable community development, community resilience, and systems that perpetuate community stress and trauma. This line of investigation includes a special emphasis on developing valid and reliable measures for determining the effectiveness of community-engaged prevention and intervention efforts in promoting resiliency and positive health outcomes to combat health inequities and related risk factors.
Dr. Brown earned her MSW (2004) from the University of South Carolina, and her MPA (2011) and PhD in Social Work (2015) from Louisiana State University. In 2020, Dr. Brown was recognized by NASW-AZ Branch II as Social Worker of the Year, and by the Association for Community Organization and Social Action (ACOSA) with the 2020 Emerging Scholar Award. In 2021, her former research unit, ASU’s Office of Community Health, Engagement and Resiliency received the President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness. Dr. Brown recently published a textbook, Social Work Skills for Community Practice: Applied Macro Social Work (2023) with Springer Publishing Company. Dr. Brown is the founder and director of the Center for Resilient Communities, part of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, that provides training to Community Health Workers (CHWs) and other health professionals on interventions to address toxic and traumatic stress for children, youth, and families.
Dr. Brown holds faculty research affiliate positions with the Mayo Clinic, as well as the Global Center for Applied Health Research and the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the U.S. Department of Justice have funded her scholarship.