The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, a competitive, national funding program focused on addressing challenging health policy issues, has selected Professor John Brekke from the USC School of Social Work to receive a grant to study mental health system transformation in America.

The Frances G. Larson Professor of Social Work Research was awarded a three-year, $400,000 grant jointly with Joel Braslow, associate professor of psychiatry, biobehavioral sciences and history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"These prestigious and highly competitive awards are only made to outstanding scholars," Dean Marilyn Flynn said. "We're extremely proud of John. His work for this award will build on his earlier National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) research and represents an exceptionally fine culmination of his long involvement in this area."

Since 1989, Brekke has been the principal investigator on five longitudinal studies funded by NIMH and one funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. This work has focused on the improvement of community-based services for individuals diagnosed with severe mental illness. He is currently a principal investigator on three NIMH grants, including a project that seeks to speed the use of evidence-based practices into community-based treatment for individuals with schizophrenia and another that examines the transformation of community-based mental health services at the levels of policy implementation, organizational change and consumer outcomes.

"The RWJ grant largely supports the book Joel and I are writing that summarizes our current research and provides an analysis of the efforts to transform mental health systems in the United States," Brekke said.

The book, From the Curative Asylum to the Broken System: Understanding Hopes and Realities in Mental Health System Transformation, builds specifically on their current NIMH-funded study of the impact of California's Mental Health Services Act on the mental health care system in Los Angeles, which is the largest in the United States.

Brekke is among 16 scholars affiliated with major universities across the country to receive a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research grant. The foundation created the program to support highly qualified researchers whose cross-cutting and bold, new ideas promise to contribute meaningfully to improving U.S. health policy. The program provides one of the few funding opportunities in the United States for investigator-initiated projects to generate scientific evidence and to identify a range of possible solutions to America's health policy challenges.