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School of Social Policy & Practice 2018 Teaching Awards

Standing Faculty Awards

There are two recipients of the 2018 SP2 Standing Faculty Teaching Award: Ioana Marinescu and Phyllis Solomon.

caption: Ioana MarinescuIoana Marinescu, assistant professor and faculty research fellow for the National Bureau of Economic Research, is an economist who studies the labor market to craft policies that can enhance employment, productivity and economic security. She teaches Economics for Social Policy and Quantitative Reasoning in the MS in Social Policy program. Dr. Marinescu’s research expertise includes online job search, competition in the labor market, unemployment insurance, the universal basic income and employment contracts. Dr. Marinescu’s research has been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Labor Economics and the Journal of Public Economics. She is engaged with policy, participating in events at the White House and the State House of Pennsylvania. She writes a monthly op-ed for the French newspaper Liberation.

caption: Phyllis SolomonPhyllis Solomon is the Kenneth Pray Chair Professor and associate dean for research, faculty fellow at the Ortner Center and the Center for High Impact Philanthropy in the School of Social Policy & Practice, and professor of social work in the  department of psychiatry and senior fellow at the Center for Public Health Initiatives at Perelman School of Medicine. She teaches research methods courses to MSW, PhD and DSW students and has a passion for teaching rigorous methods and their application to social work practice. Her research focuses on interventions and service delivery issues for persons with severe mental illness and their families. Her recent research examines issues of family violence for persons with severe mental illness in the US and Japan. She has received numerous awards for her research and teaching, including the Provost’s Award for Distinguished PhD Teaching and Mentoring, Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Social Work & Research and the Knee/Wittman Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Mental Health Policy & Practice from NASW Foundation, to name a few.

Non-Standing Faculty Awards

There are two recipients of the 2018 SP2 Non-Standing Faculty Teaching Awards: Melanie Masin-Moyer and Nadya Shmavonian.

caption: Melanie Masin-MoyerMelanie Masin-Moyer has been in clinical practice for more than 20 years at a non-profit community behavioral health agency, working with individuals and families across the lifespan. Over the past several years, she has devoted her clinical focus to group therapy, which inspired her doctoral work involving group therapy with women with histories of trauma. Dr. Masin-Moyer completed her clinical doctorate in social work in May 2017 at the University of Pennsylvania and began a new role as a full-time lecturer at Penn in August 2017. She received her BA in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and her MSW from Marywood University, where she also worked as an adjunct instructor.

She feels privileged to have worked in partnership with her clients and to be able to share her passion and commitment to the values of social work with her students. She has taught classes in human behavior, research methods, trauma, foundations of practice and advanced clinical practice. She recently completed a NIAAA Fellowship training for social work educators to enhance integration of substance use disorder issues across program curricula. She feels invigorated by her students and is deeply grateful to be able to nurture the next generation of social workers.

caption: Nadya ShmavonianNadya K. Shmavonian is the director of the Nonprofit Repositioning Fund and a partner at SeaChange Capital Partners. The Nonprofit Repositioning Fund is a Philadelphia-based pooled fund of philanthropic partners that encourages and supports mergers and other types of formal, long-term strategic alliances and restructuring opportunities among non-profit organizations in the Greater Philadelphia region. SeaChange is a New York-based non-profit merchant bank whose mission is to enable transactions that increase the impact of non-profits while offering leveraged opportunities for funders. In addition to her ongoing management of the Nonprofit Repositioning Fund, Ms. Shmavonian contributes to SeaChange’s national collaboration field building and advisory services and explores potential opportunities for SeaChange to engage in projects in the Greater Philadelphia region.

Ms. Shmavonian served as president of Public/Private Ventures (P/PV) from 2010-2012, where she presided over the responsible dissolution of the organization. She has extensive foundation management experience, having served as vice president for strategy at the Rockefeller Foundation and executive vice president at The Pew Charitable Trusts, where she also worked as director of administration and as a program officer in health and human services.

Ms. Shmavonian serves on the boards of many nonprofits and is an SP2 instructor, teaching graduate seminars on non-profit governance. She holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MBA with a concentration in health care management from Wharton. She was awarded the Kathleen McDonald Distinguished Alumna Award from Wharton Women in Business in 2011.

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