Eagleton Faculty, Staff and Visiting Associates
Dr. Elizabeth Sloan-Power is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Social Work and previous Interim Chair for the Department of Urban Education, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers-Newark. She received her PhD in Clinical Social Work from New York University (NYU, 2007) and her MSW from Rutgers University (1993). Prior to her academic endeavors, Dr. Sloan-Power worked as a clinician in the AIDS, hospice and homelessness fields and directed homes for women living with AIDS and their children in Boston, MA.
Most recently, Dr. Sloan-Power was co-PI and Core Director of Training and Education for the NJ Center on Gun Violence Research at Rutgers launched in fall of 2018-2020, the second such Center in the nation. While at Rutgers, Dr. Sloan-Power has been very interested in how people recover and heal from various forms of trauma in their life and across their life course. Specifically, she has studied childhood violence exposure, contextualized coping with the threat of such violence and personal resilience.
As a result of a previous NIMH study, Dr. SloanPower developed a multidimensional, multimethod protocol for individualized assessments of youths’ exposure to violence in relation to their mental health including PTSD entitled, Overall Coping Zone Assessment Score (OCZS; Sloan-Power et al., 2013). As well, she has used this
tool in other studies measuring the threat and coping levels of individuals and communities facing threatening situations including conflict due to opposing belief system differences. Her expertise in qualitative analyses and mixed-methodological research as well as her ongoing focus on contextualized coping, and childhood mental health provides and offers a resource for similar and/or future exploration and intervention in the areas of individual and community trauma, and the subsequent mental and physical healthcare needed for their personal trauma recovery over time.
Dr. Sloan-Power is also very interested in the power of self-determination and how and when families and communities come together in such times of need. In doing so, she has developed educational programming focusing on conflict resolution and the arts, community-building related to re-entry, homelessness, vulnerable youth, aging adults and mental health. Dr. SloanPower plans to continue her community-engaged research in the areas of coping, resilience and conflict resolution as a form of meaning-making for children and their families who may be facing crisis as well as provide trainings and workshops in the area of trauma recovery for both individual groups and the community at-large