Smith College SSW will welcome five new resident faculty members in June 2021.
New faculty pictured above left to right: Loren Cahill, Shveta Kumaria, Brandyn-Dior McKinley, Alberto Guerrero and JaLisa Williams.
The new faculty joining the tenure track are:
Assistant Professor Loren Cahill, M.S.W., Ph.D. (expected), focuses her research on identifying and understanding institutional and informal spaces of strength, resilience and thriving for Black women and girls, how they are created, how they work and how Black women and girls engage with them. Loren engages in deep and rich community partnerships to do this work. Her doctoral work is in Critical Social Personality Environmental Psychology.
Assistant Professor Shveta Kumaria, M.A., Ph.D. (social work), LCSW, has focused her research on the development and use of clinician wisdom in clinical practice with BIPOC clients, how clinicians integrate this wisdom with clinical theory and in the training and supervision of therapists. Shveta has completed a psychoanalytic pre-doctoral fellowship with the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, as well as a M.Phil. in clinical psychology from the National Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences in India. She completed a post-doctoral clinical scholar fellowship at The Family Institute at Northwestern University in 2019 and now holds the position of staff therapist and research associate there.
Assistant Professor Brandyn-Dior McKinley, M.S.W., Ph.D., focuses on the strategies that middle-class African American mothers use to support their daughters to navigate the complexities of institutional and interpersonal racism and to ensure their thriving. Brandyn’s doctoral work has been in human development and family studies with a particular focus on Black families and mothering.
Smith SSW will also welcome two faculty to 15 month appointments:
Lecturer Alberto Guerrero, M.S.W., Ph.D. is a deeply experienced instructor both in the classroom and field education settings. Alberto currently teaches at SSW in our clinical practice courses and field lab. With doctoral studies in social justice education with an emphasis on student development, Alberto brings particular expertise in student advisement. His research and practice experience has centered on mental health services within the justice system, housing and healthcare and substance misuse and treatment.
Lecturer JaLisa Williams, M.S.W., LCSW is currently on the faculty of the Metropolitan State University in Denver where she has taught both in the classroom and in field settings. JaLisa’s teaching and research interests center on anti-oppressive social work, generational trauma in the Black community and mindfulness based interventions among other topics. She has a strong clinical background and has been running a private therapy practice, Yemaya Innergy Therapeutics, serving Black and Queer folk in the Denver area. JaLisa integrates strengths-based and narrative approaches into her mindfulness based CBT work and is a certified yoga instructor.
