Dr. Mary Ellen Brown

Mary-Ellen Brown, PhD, LCSW is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work of the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions at Arizona State University. Through varied experiences in Brown's academic and professional history, she has a robust background in research and evaluation, community health, positive youth development, and neighborhood planning and revitalization. Her scholarship is focused on the effects of poverty and violence as related to the health and wellbeing of underserved communities, including Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, and urban Native American populations. Over the course of her career she has secured over $16 million in external funding for projects to engage, mobilize, and build the capacity of residents of minority and underserved communities to actively address and reduce the factors of violence and poverty that impact health disparities and positive health outcomes, including mental health.

Brown's areas of specialized research include examining social determinants of health embedded in components of equitable community development, community health, and systems that perpetuate poverty and community stress and trauma. This line of investigation includes a special emphasis on developing valid and reliable measures for determining the effectiveness of community-engaged prevention and intervention efforts in promoting positive health outcomes to combat minority health inequities and related risk factors.