Global Research Impact

GSSW’s Philip and Eleanor Winn Endowed Professor for Children and Youth, Bender focuses her research on young people experiencing homelessness. She is striving to understand their needs, engage them in social-change projects and help them to develop skills that can prevent adverse experiences. She has served as co-PI on a six-state, multi-site research project to better understand risk and protective factors among youth experiencing homelessness. Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, she also served as PI on a three-year randomized trial of a mindfulness-based intervention to prevent victimization and substance use among youth in emergency shelters. In 2023 as a Fulbright Fellow, Bender studied youth participation and activism in Taiwan. Bender is also an American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW) Fellow.

Jenson, the Philip and Eleanor Winn Endowed Professor Emeritus, has predominately focused his research in two areas: applying a public health approach to preventing child and adolescent health and behavior problems and evaluating preventive interventions aimed at promoting healthy youth development. Jenson has published nine books and numerous articles and chapters on topics related to child and adolescent development and prevention science. He served as a co-lead for the Grand Challenge to Ensure Healthy Development for All Youth and is an AASWSW Fellow. He retired in 2020, and in 2022 he received the Society for Social Work and Research Distinguished Career Award.

Until his retirement at the end of the 2024–25 academic year, Walls focused his research primarily on risk and resilience across the lifespan of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender and nonbinary communities from an intersectional perspective, as well as the integration of social justice in social work education. Known nationally as an anti-oppressive scholar, Walls’ most recent endeavor is a forthcoming edited volume with Cambridge University Press that outlines a decolonial, critical approach to quantitative methodology in social work research. He says, “For too long we have trained emerging social work scholars in quantitative methods-as-usual that fail to live up to our profession’s goals of liberation and equity. Our hope with this new book is to give scholars the needed tools to enable our work to have an even greater impact.”

According to Bender, “At GSSW, our research and scholarship are focused on advancing social justice and meeting community needs. It is gratifying to know that our work, and the work of our many community partners and collaborators, is being read, cited and used for social change.”