Laura Abrams, prolific youth welfare researcher, named USC social work dean

Laura Abrams, a professor in the department of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, has been named the next dean of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Abrams, who will begin work on July 1, will also be appointed as the David Lawrence Stein/Violet Goldberg Sachs Professor of Mental Health.

After a more than 30-year career documenting and improving the well-being of incarcerated youth and young adults, the Los Angeles native is ready to steer USC’s social work school into an era of innovation: using technology for social good, reaching isolated communities across the city and collaborating at the clinical level with the university’s health sciences schools.

“This is the right time for me in my career to come to USC,” Abrams said. “I’m enthusiastic about the faculty and the students in the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work — and also the alumni, the board and the community that make up this large and influential school that does incredible work where it’s located and beyond.”

“We are delighted to welcome Laura Abrams to USC, which is a very important hire for the school,” said Steven D. Shapiro, USC’s senior vice president for health affairs. “Abrams’ established steady leadership, scholarly expertise and dedication to championing specialized populations make her the ideal choice as dean for the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.”

“Laura Abrams brings an exceptional track record of scholarship and leadership to USC,” said Beong-Soo Kim, interim president of USC. “Her commitment to cross-disciplinary engagement and community impact will drive innovation at the school and beyond.”

Shapiro and Kim both offered gratitude to Vassilios Papadopoulos, dean of the USC Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, who has served as interim dean at the school for the past few years.

A crash course in social work

Abrams’ interest in social work began before she fully understood the field. As a history of ideas undergraduate major at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, Abrams studied the work of women from the progressive era who changed labor laws and fought for the rights of children and for the establishment of child-friendly spaces where young people could thrive, such as compulsory kindergarten and neighborhood playgrounds.

Abrams said a job right after college at a group home for young women gave her a crash course in understanding the plight of young people in out-of-home care, and how policies shape the movement of youth through social welfare systems once they are removed from their home. After witnessing how the young women in the group home struggled, she realized that the system wasn’t serving vulnerable young populations. The experience inspired Abrams to get a master’s degree and eventually a doctorate in social welfare from the University of California, Berkeley.

“My career since then has focused on trying to do better for youth who we deem to be troubled,” Abrams said.

Studying the youth carceral experience

Abrams’ recent work on specialized populations — including commercially and sexually exploited minors and youth with life sentences — has contributed to state and local policy reforms that emphasize alternatives to incarceration. She is also leading a landmark national study on the juvenile life-without-parole population in the United States.

Her work examining the effects of incarceration of very young offenders led to a state bill in California barring juvenile justice jurisdiction for youth under age 12, a model that is spreading nationally.

“All of my work in the last 30 years or so has been focused on adolescents and young adults and the carceral system because that’s a place where many youths end up who are just having troubles in life, whether that’s mental-health struggles, or struggles with foster care, or family struggles,” Abrams said.

She has written five books and two monographs focusing on incarcerated youth, pathways to civic engagement and racial justice. She has received numerous awards for her scholarship, including the 2020 Society for Social Work and Research best scholarly book award for her 2017 book, Everyday Desistance: The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth, co-written with Diane J. Terry, and the Frank R. Bruel prize for the best published article in Social Service Review, “Juvenile Justice at a Crossroads: Science, Evidence, and Twenty-First Century Reform” (2013). In addition, she and her colleagues and trainees have authored more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications.

In 2022, Abrams was appointed to the inaugural Faculty Mentoring Honor Society at UCLA, and this year received the California Social Welfare Archives’ Frances Lomas Feldman Award for excellence in social work education. In 2016, she became an elected fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and a fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research.

A new champion for the school

Abrams said she looks forward to championing the school, highlighting its work and creating opportunities for students, faculty and staff to feel that their work is valued and impactful.

“USC has an incredible amount of great research centers and very active researchers who are testing scalable interventions for trauma-informed clinical work addressing issues that are very pertinent to L.A.,” she said.

During her deanship, Abrams hopes that the school can lead the conversation on how human interventions can ensure that technology advances in a way that is ethical and beneficial to communities.

“I see USC as a place where we can compete for grants in that area, where we might be able to partner with tech companies that are interested in driving ethical AI in social work,” she said.

She also hopes for more social work research to identify isolated communities — including elders, linguistic minorities and people who are unhoused — to restore a sense of community and ethical resource allocation in L.A.

On a clinical level, Abrams sees ongoing opportunities for innovative collaboration with USC’s health sciences schools around neurological issues such as addiction and behavioral health.

“I have a deep commitment to undergraduate and graduate education as a way to train and produce the best social workers that we can educate at USC,” Abrams said.