Discourse

 Chris Del Conte is a highly regarded national leader in college athletics. He has more than 30 years of experience in building highly successful athletic departments, including at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is currently vice president and athletics director. Under his leadership, Texas has won numerous NCAA national championships in multiple Learfield Directors Cups, signifying the excellence of UT Athletics.

Dr. Gautam Yadama is the dean of the Boston College School of Social Work.  His research is focused on understanding poverty and environment dynamics and he is a leading researcher on interventions to improve social economic environment and health outcomes. He's a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, a member of the Implementation Science Network on Clean Cooking at the Fogerty Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

Philip Osteen is the dean of the College of Social Work at the Unviersity of Utah.  Dean Osteen has served in a variety of roles in mental and behavioral health for over three decades, including case management, community-based residential treatment and clinical research. His work has shifted more recently to evaluating interventions for men, and he is actively engaged in an initiative to expand access to higher education.

Justin Dyer serves as the dean of the UT Austin School of Civic Leadership. He's also a government professor who writes and teaches in the fields of American political thought, jurisprudence and constitutionalism, with an emphasis on the philosophical tradition of natural law. Previously, he was a professor of political science at the University of Missouri, where he also served as the founding director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy.

Philip Hong is dean of the University of Georgia School of Social Work, where he has been since 2022.  He's an academic leader nationally and internationally, and a scholar whose research focuses on poverty alleviation and workforce development, among other social work topics. Prior to this work, Dean Hong was Associate Dean for Research at the Loyola University in Chicago Knoll School of Social Work, where he also directed the Center for Research on Self Sufficiency, or CROS. His research also includes social work interventions, a model that he developed, called TIP, or Transforming the Impossible into Possible, which is a national model for social policies that promote self sufficiency and family strengthening. TIP is being applied and tested as a model to support communities in the areas of employment and workforce development, health promotion, youth development and empowerment, returning citizen reentry, and substance use recovery, among other needs.

Dr. Melanie Sage is an expert at the intersection of emerging technologies, teaching and learning and empathy and engagement. With two decades of experience across social work practice, the academy and private industry as well as consulting, she is a go-to expert for academics and organizations reinventing how they work with technology in ways that center on the humans in the room. Melanie's experience includes 12 years on social work faculties. She's a creative entrepreneur at heart. She has spent time in, the public sector as well as in the academy, as a researcher at Meta, for example, and has worked on ways to improve social media equity across many platforms. She's co author of the CSWE bestselling text, Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology, which we'll talk about today. She's also the author of dozens of journal articles about tech and social work teaching and practice. Today, Melanie channels her passion to empower professionals to harness technology's potential benefits while minding risks and staying true to their core values of human dignity and empathy.

Halaevalu Vakalahi is the president and CEO of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE). She's a Pacific Islander born in Tonga and raised in Hawaii. Her areas of teaching expertise include social policy, human behavior, and the social work environment, and organizational leadership. Her two areas of research and scholarship are Pacific Islander culture and community, and women of color in academia. She earned a BS in business management from BYU Hawaii and MSW from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and a master's in education and PhD in social work from the University of Utah.

Michael Spencer is the Balmer Endowed Dean in Social Work at the University of Washington School of Social Work. He made history with the 2023 appointment, becoming the first ever native Hawaiian to serve as a dean at the University of Washington. He's an expert on indigenous population health and wellness and recently served as the Director of Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander and Oceanic Affairs at the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute. He's originally from O'ahu and is a graduate of Kamehameha Schools. Dean Spencer's research examines health and wellness among native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, focusing on interventions to promote health among native Hawaiians through indigenous practices and values. He also received his degree in social work from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992.

Jonathan Singer is professor of social work at Loyola University Chicago and a thought leader in social work education research and practice. His primary areas of research include suicide intervention, cyberbullying, family based interventions, community services, school social work, and he also conducts research and is a thought leader with respect to many matters that lie at the intersections of social work and technology. In 2007, he created the Social Work Podcast.