SP2 Standing Faculty

The Excellence in Teaching Award is presented to both standing and non-standing faculty members in recognition of excellence in teaching and mentoring during the previous year. Winners of this award are chosen by the Student Policies and Procedures Committee from the pool of five standing and five non-standing faculty with the highest quantitative scores for “overall quality of the instructor” on the course evaluations.

The 2021 award honorees are as follows.

Ram A. Cnaan is a professor and the director of the Program for Religion and Social Policy Research at SP2. He is the founder and faculty director of the Goldring Reentry Initiative, which works to reduce recidivism and help returning citizens to better integrate in society. He is also a Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University Graduate Institute of Peace Studies in South Korea. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.

He is the past president of ARNOVA (Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action). He is the originator of the first practice doctoral degree in social work (DSW), which is now in its 10th year and has been emulated by some 12 schools nationwide.

Dr. Cnaan received his doctorate degree from the School of Social Work at the University of Pittsburgh and his BSW and MSW (both cum laude) from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. He has published numerous articles in scientific journals on a variety of social issues, mainly faith-based organizations, volunteerism, criminal justice, social policy, and social development. He serves on the editorial boards of 11 academic journals and is the author or editor of eight academic books including The Other Philadelphia Story: How Local Congregations Support Quality of Life in Urban America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) and Cases in Innovative Nonprofits: Organizations That Make a Difference (Sage, 2014). Currently, Dr. Cnaan is working on three new books: one on religious organization and society; one on community organizations; and a family history project. In his spare time, Dr. Cnaan collects and publishes books on antique obsolete tools. He also collects Inuit prints. He is considered an international expert in the areas of faith-based social care, volunteering, prisoners’ reentry, and social policy. He lectures widely and teaches regularly in four countries.

Allison Werner-Lin is an associate professor at SP2. Her research addresses the intersection of genomic discovery and family life. Her work is among the first to explore the psychosocial challenges unique to women and men of reproductive age who carry a genetic mutation that confers elevated risk of cancer. Dr. Werner-Lin has served as an investigator in multiple interdisciplinary, NIH-funded grants examining dissemination and implementation of emerging genomic technologies in reproductive, pediatric, adolescent, and emerging adult contexts. Presently, Dr. Werner-Lin is an investigator on a Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot Grant with the Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania, where she is examining barriers to cascade genetic testing in families of pediatric cancer survivors. She is a senior advisor to the Clinical Genetics branch of the division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute, where she oversees psychosocial research addressing hereditary tumor predisposition syndromes, including Li-Fraumeni syndrome and inherited bone marrow failure syndromes. She is a member of the Scientific Committee governing the International Meeting on Psychosocial Aspects of Hereditary Cancer, and in 2019, she was a visiting scholar at the Hastings Center for Bioethics. In 2021 she will assume the role of director of research for the Association of Oncology Social Work.

Dr. Werner-Lin has held multiple training grants to build and evaluate interdisciplinary educational programs in oncology, genome-based health literacy, and health care social work practice. She has partnered with local and national agencies that seek to identify how best the rapidly evolving knowledge base of genomics may be translated into education and outreach programs for teachers and families. At SP2, she is founder and director of the Advanced Certificate in Oncology Social Work continuing education program and director of the Social Work in Health Care Specialization for the MSW program. She regularly advises MSW and DSW students and teaches advanced clinical social work practice, family caregiving, and qualitative research methods. In 2020 she won SP2’s Excellence in Teaching Award.

Dr. Werner-Lin received her MSW and PhD from the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. She earned a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, and a bachelor of arts in family studies and psychology from Wellesley College. She is a fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research and a distinguished scholar and fellow of the National Academies of Practice in Social Work. She was recently honored by the CSWE’s Council on the Role and Status of Women in Social Work Education for outstanding mentorship. Dr. Werner-Lin is a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and Pennsylvania. She has practiced in community-based organizations providing individual, family, and group counseling and psychotherapy to families affected by cancer, and she maintains a small private practice for parentally bereaved children and teens.

SP2 Non-Standing Faculty

Meredith Myers is a senior fellow in the Wharton School’s Center for Leadership and Change Management. She has benn a member of the Penn faculty since 2009, working within the Wharton School, SP2, and the Positive Psychology Center. Dr. Myers has won excellence in teaching awards in the Wharton School and SP2’s MS in Nonprofit Leadership program.

Dr. Myers is also the executive director of Job Crafting LLC, an organization that helps people bring more purpose and engagement to their work. In her research and consulting, she has coached international leaders, executives, and board members in corporations, non-profits, government, and mission-critical teams. Her key areas of interest include optimal human performance, leadership, collaborating in contentious contexts, training the trainer, bias in decision-making, and the science of emotions.

Dr. Myers holds a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University. She is also a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Huntsman Program in International Studies & Business, earning a BS in economics from the Wharton School and a BA in international studies from the College of Arts & Sciences.

Matthew Bennett teaches the course Data Analysis for Social Impact as part of the nonprofit leadership (NPL) program. He is a professorial research fellow at the Centre for International Research on Care, Labour and Equalities (CIRCLE) at the University of Sheffield, U.K. Dr. Bennett received his MSc and DPhil in sociology from the University of Oxford, and his BA in psychology and sociology from the University of Washington.

Dr. Bennett’s expertise is in inequalities and wellbeing outcomes of care, prosocial behaviour and social diversity. He is a co-investigator in the Economic and Social Research Council’s (U.K.) “Sustainable Care,” and the National Institute for Health Research’s (U.K.) “Achieving Closure” programs, which look at the cost and contributions of care and the impact of care home closures. He is also principal investigator on an ESRC award that looks at the impact of diversity on intergroup relations, stress (allostatic load) and wellbeing. His expertise is in linking and analyzing large-scale surveys and administrative datasets using advanced statistical methods (multilevel, panel and structural equation models). Dr. Bennett’s social care research (both academic and co-produced with Carers U.K.) has consistently featured in the media nationally and has been debated in the House of Lords. He also works with SP2 professor Peter Frumkin as assistant director of the Social Impact Fellowship, which brings together some of the top doctoral researchers in the world working in the area of voluntary sector and non-profit studies. He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Social Policy and the International Journal of Care and Caring.

Daniel Baker is a lecturer in the MSSP Program, where he teaches courses in policy analysis and policy communication. He holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Washington, a JD from Duke University, a graduate diploma in economics from the University of Cambridge, and an MPP and a PhD in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Baker’s research focuses on the theory of social policy and public administration, looking at the intersection of democratic theory, ethics, and practical policy analysis. In particular, his research aims to reconcile the normative obligations in deliberative democracy, one of the most prominent conceptions of democracy in modern political theory, with the practical and pragmatic arguments for cost-benefit analysis and evidence-based policy that sway much of the social policy and public administration literatures.

Dr. Baker is a licensed attorney in his home state of Washington and practiced law near Seattle before pursuing his doctoral degree. He has published on the First Amendment and researches the interplay between legal obligations and moral obligations in modern governance. Outside of work, Dr. Baker plays chess and reads extensively about economic history and the history of philosophy.