Suzanne Wenzel has devoted much of her career to interdisciplinary research that seeks to understand and improve the health and well-being of marginalized populations, particularly individuals with current or prior experiences of homelessness in urban communities.

Wenzel has served as the principal investigator on ten grants from the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development), and has been an investigator and collaborator on multiple other research projects and initiatives sponsored by federal, state and local entities, and has regularly served as a peer reviewer on scientific panels for the National Institutes of Health and for several international research institutes.

Her research involving persons experiencing homelessness has utilized multi-method approaches in investigations of the social ecological context of service access and risks for HIV/AIDS, substance misuse, and other behavioral health issues among women*, men*, and transition age youth; associations among partner violence, substance use, mental health, and HIV/AIDS risk among women*; and community-engaged development and adaption of evidence-based programming to address HIV risk and trauma symptoms among women*.  Among persons experiencing long-term homelessness and physical and behavioral health challenges, she has also investigated how health, service utilization, social relationships, and other indicators of life quality and well-being change over time as persons transition to and live in apartments of their own.  In other NIH-sponsored research, Wenzel has investigated quality of treatment for substance misuse in therapeutic communities for adolescents and adults, and referral linkages between drug treatment courts and community-based providers of behavioral health and other services.  In 2020, she conducted an evaluation of Los Angeles County’s efforts to expand and enhance services provided through permanent supportive housing.

Wenzel served as a consultant on homelessness and housing for the White House Office of National HIV/AIDS Policy during the Obama administration, has served on the research council of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, and participated in a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine initiative to evaluate evidence pertaining to permanent supportive housing and health outcomes.  She co-organized and presented in two national meetings (Harvard and USC) focused on needs of women* experiencing homelessness, organized a Los Angeles County-wide forum at USC on the topic of integrated health care and housing, and has served on the steering committee of the USC Homelessness Policy Research Institute.

Since joining the USC Dworak-Peck School of Social Work as a tenured professor, she has served in leadership roles for the school and university, including department chair, associate dean for research, interim dean and vice provost for faculty and academic affairs.

Wenzel has taught Science of Social Work in the MSW program and Social Work Research Methods and Grant Writing in the PhD program. Lending expertise in behavioral health, she recently participated in a Social Work Education Capacity Expansion (SWECE) Grant from the Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI), State of California. Prior to joining USC, she was a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where she also directed research quality assurance for the RAND Health program.

* persons self-identified

To reference the work of Suzanne Wenzel online, we ask that you directly quote their work where possible and attribute it to "Suzanne Wenzel, faculty at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work” (LINK: https://dworakpeck.usc.edu)