PhD Student Spotlight

Many members of the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work (GSSW) community know Dom Harris, LCSW, from her roles as an adjunct instructor, coordinator for the course Disproportionality and Disparities Across Systems, and assistant program director of the MSW@Denver online MSW program, which she held until this fall. For the past year, she also helped to audit MSW course content to ensure compliance with the Council on Social Work Education’s diversity, equity and inclusion standards.

Harris has now stepped away from those roles to enter GSSW’s PhD program. As a new doctoral student, she brings several years of social work experience in health care and child welfare settings and as a therapist in private practice. She also served five years in the U.S. Air Force, where she worked as a fusion analyst, a role that included collecting, analyzing, evaluating and disseminating intelligence information. While in the Air Force, Harris was credentialed as a Department of Defense Victim Advocate and served as the primary volunteer victim advocate for the Fort Gordon installation. She also was a Certified Air Force Resiliency Training Assistant who educated other Air Force personnel about resiliency to prevent future burnout.

Harris still provides social-justice-focused individual therapy for a small caseload of clients. Harris explains, “A lot of the social justice piece is recognizing that when something is coming from their history and impacting them now, how the systems we live in can exacerbate those problems. Some of it is acceptance, sometimes it is ‘what can I do to change this?’ and helping them to see it’s not a problem with them.”

Harris initially started college as a business major and says she did not know social work was a profession. After a friend introduced her to social work, Harris took an introductory course and was hooked. She earned a BSW from the University of Valley Forge and an MSW from Edinboro University. She started a DSW program but decided she wanted a more research-oriented focus, so she left the program after the first year. Harris recalls, “I had been working at DU since 2021 and knew how embedded social justice was in our master’s program and thought, if there was a program I’d apply to as a PhD, it was DU.”

She adds, “GSSW has been a really great place for me to grow. Being an adjunct, I was able to be in contact with content that wasn’t in other programs. I learned a lot just by teaching.”

The experience teaching MSW courses sparked her interest in studying social work higher education. Specifically, her doctoral research will examine the implicit curriculum in social work higher education: that is, how staff and faculty experience shows up in the classroom, and the preparation faculty receive.

Harris explains, “A lot of higher education is taught by adjuncts, and the bar for preparation is set low: If you’ve worked in the field, you can teach the content. There are a lot of master’s-level instructors, but the only people getting the in-depth education piece are at the doctoral level. I saw a gap.” Harris also intends to explore how staff positions impact “how students are able to show up in class and support their work.”

Ultimately, she says, when she sees a gap, she works to fill it. “That’s the social worker in me.”