A trio of new assistant professors joining the USC School of Social Work this fall is continuing the school’s trend toward diverse and interdisciplinary scholarship.

Daniel Hackman, Mónica Pérez Jolles and B.K. Elizabeth Kim have multifaceted research interests that range from exploring how early life socioenvironmental factors influence later risk of psychopathology and health problems to examining how to improve services and opportunities for vulnerable children and their caregivers.

“These three new assistant professors are highly skilled scholars whose innovative research represents a valuable contribution to the school,” said Haluk Soydan, associate dean for faculty affairs and senior fellow for global research impact. “We are excited to welcome them to our faculty and look forward to helping them continue their development as outstanding independent researchers.”

Daniel Hackman

Hackman grew up in Santa Monica in a family that emphasized social justice and equality, instilling a sense that he should do what he could to help people and improve the world.

After studying neuroscience at Brown University as an undergraduate, he returned to Los Angeles County to work as a public health policy advocate involved in grassroots community organizing. In particular, he focused on seeking broad solutions to reduce children’s risk of developing chronic diseases.

“One of the formative aspects of that experience is that it really shaped how I see my work through a social justice lens,” Hackman said.

When examining rates of chronic disease and risk factors by legislative districts, it became clear that individuals living in areas with the most socioeconomic disadvantages had much higher risk.

“What is it about poverty and the different types of experiences people have growing up that shapes their development and risk of chronic disease?” he said. “Right now, we are learning more about how context influences psychological and neurobiological development, but the implications of that for health and the outcomes we care about for children and adolescents as they age are less known.”

Intrigued by the interplay between early social and environmental experiences and later health and psychological development, he pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and recently served as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin.

During his studies and burgeoning research career, Hackman has tended to focus on two aspects of psychology and neurobiology: stress reactivity and executive function. The former refers to how people respond to challenges in their environment, whereas the latter deals with how individuals regulate their responses to their environment.

This unusual confluence of fields, including population health, sociology, psychology and neuroscience, left Hackman yearning for a setting that would not only permit but encourage a transdisciplinary mindset.

“It’s certainly part of what drew me to USC,” he said. “I’m excited about the interest, openness and leadership in taking that transdisciplinary approach, both at the school and also the university more broadly.”

In his new position, Hackman plans to continue exploring the connections among early experiences, psychology, neuroscience and human development, in addition to testing the use of virtual reality technology in his research.

In recent years, he has started developing virtual models of neighborhood environments, in collaboration with colleagues at ETH Zurich, to examine in real time how different contexts and conditions can affect an individual’s response to stress and capacity to manage challenges. He hopes to continue and expand this work at USC.

“Something has always attracted me to bringing together different fields to address big questions,” Hackman said.

Mónica Pérez Jolles

Similar to her new colleague, Pérez Jolles is also interested in issues of social justice, socioeconomic status and child development. Her research interests center on underserved children and caregivers, including racial and ethnic minorities and individuals with co-occurring physical and mental health issues.

A Colombia native, Pérez Jolles began her professional career in Bogotá after earning a degree in psychology from Santo Tomás University. She worked with families experiencing extreme poverty and limited access to basic services, many of whom had migrated from rural areas due to violence or lack of opportunities.

“The common denominator that struck me was the lack of access and isolation of these families,” she said. “I just found it extremely unfair. That certainly informed my efforts when I came to the United States.”

Pérez Jolles completed a master’s degree in psychology from North Carolina Central University. Based on her experience working in the community, she recognized the need to better inform policy makers and find practical solutions to the lack of health services access and quality for underserved families.

To that end, she obtained a doctorate in health policy and management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and recently completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, where she focused on addressing health and social inequities by evaluating system capacity and individual-level interventions.

“I’m concerned with the quality of services that children and their caregivers receive, especially those from low-income or racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds,” she said. “My research focuses on why and how safety-net agencies innovate and get communities and clients involved in innovation.”

Because social work is grounded in values of equality, social justice and inclusion, Pérez Jolles found it an ideal match for her research agenda. In particular, she is encouraged by the increasing focus on interdisciplinary collaboration in social work, in addition to USC’s strength in systems and organizational research.

Having a research center with dedicated resources for junior faculty members to move their research forward, including statistical consulting and grant proposal development, is one major benefit that drew her to the USC School of Social Work.

She also values the school’s engagement with the communities surrounding the two main USC campuses and the diversity of the Los Angeles region.

“There is a lot of opportunity and hope,” Pérez Jolles said. “There is also a lot of work to be done. We still have millions of uninsured children and caregivers, many without secure housing and without secure meals each day.”

In the coming years, she plans to conduct research on a model of care for children known as the pediatric medical home. In particular, she is interested in determining whether coordinating care among providers and other agencies such as child welfare services improves services for children with complex health care and social needs, including chronic conditions such as obesity, psychiatric disorders and development delays.

“Are they successfully implementing this model of care and are they able to sustain those efforts?” she said. “They are being asked to do a lot with few resources.”

B.K. Elizabeth Kim

Kim is also interested in child and youth development, specifically in terms of prevention and intervention efforts that promote social, behavioral and emotional health and reduce delinquency and violence during adolescence.

As an undergraduate at UCLA, she volunteered at Camp Kilpatrick, a youth probation program in the Santa Monica Mountains. Once a week, she traveled to the camp to tutor young men who were preparing for their high school exit exam.

One 17-year-old stood out to her in particular. He had made tremendous progress in the program but seemed to become more fearful as his release date approached. He was worried he would return to his neighborhood and fall back into his old habits.

“That made me really think about what we could do outside of these locked-up facilities, what we could do out in the community to support these young men so they don’t end up coming back,” Kim said. “That pushed me toward social work.”

While completing her MSW at the University of Michigan, Kim conducted a yearlong ethnographic study for her thesis on the complex journey of homeless pregnant and parenting teenagers. Witnessing young women who faced homelessness, domestic violence, foster care, expulsion and other negative outcomes opened her eyes to the importance of prevention.

She collaborated with a local homeless shelter to secure funding for a science-based prevention program that mobilizes community coalitions to promote healthy youth development. Although she enjoyed working at the grassroots level, however, Kim felt drawn to policy work as she entered the doctoral program at the University of Washington.

“I needed to do something on the mezzo or macro level,” she said. “Clinical work is really important, but I wanted to have a broader impact, to use research to inform policy and practice.”

That desire led her to work with researchers on the Community Youth Development Study, a randomized controlled trial of a youth delinquency prevention system known as Communities That Care. Based on scientific evidence, the system helps community members determine which preventive approach is most appropriate for their neighborhood.

Rather than focusing on negative outcomes and factors that increase delinquency, Kim decided to approach the problem from the opposite end of the spectrum, exploring protective factors that prevent adolescents from engaging in risky behaviors.

Her research on the topic suggested a promising effect of increasing protective factors based on the social development model.

“If you provide a young person with positive opportunities, teach them skills to become engaged and provide recognition, they will be positively bonded to you,” Kim said, thus increasing the youth’s receptivity to advice such as avoiding drugs and staying in school.

During her most recent work as a postdoctoral scholar with the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, she has examined the effects of school-based prevention strategies on the growth of protective factors among racially and ethnically diverse students in a Bay Area school district. She plans to continue exploring social and emotional learning programs that focus on building not just academic abilities but also relationship and problem-solving skills.

She ultimately hopes to develop a network of adolescents that can contribute to her research on delinquency and violence prevention programs, allowing them to add their perspective on what approaches will work best.

“We need to prevent young people from ever getting involved in this revolving door of juvenile justice involvement,” Kim said, “and set them up on a positive trajectory.”