School of Social Work Professor Elizabeth Lightfoot has been named to the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, academic social work’s highest honor.

The academy‘s aim is to celebrate excellence in social work and social welfare by recognizing outstanding research, scholarship, and practice that advance the social good.

Lightfoot’s research centers on disability policy and services, with a focus on the intersections of disability with child welfare, aging, disparities, and abuse. She has published 110 peer-reviewed articles and other publications.

Her research has received funding from a variety of federal and local sources, most recently from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation, and the Minnesota Agricultural Extension Service.  Her research findings have been used as evidence the creation of national policies involving disability.

Lightfoot also has been a national leader in the academic social work profession, serving as the president of the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education in Social Work (GADE), the secretary of the Society for Social Work and Research, and a board member for the Council on Social Work Education.

In October 2019, she received GADE’s Faculty Award for Educational Leadership in Doctoral Education in recognition of her work to expand GADE’s efforts to build the capacity of doctoral programs and promote doctoral education across North America.

She has also been active internationally, receiving two year-long Fulbright Scholar awards. In 2008, she spent a year at the University of Namibia, where she developed an internship collaboration in which she takes a group of University of Minnesota master’s of social work students to Namibia each summer to complete an internship program.

 She just returned from her second Fulbright, serving as the Senior Fulbright Social Science Scholar at the University of Bucharest in Romania, where she taught doctoral students and conducted research on disability and social work related issues.

Lightfoot was  not aware that she had been nominated for this high honor until she received an email notice a few days ago.

“I was very surprised and humbled to learn that I was selected to join the AASWSW. It is a huge honor to be included in the academy, both for me and the University of Minnesota. I look forward to collaborating with other fellows to ensure that our social work research leads to substantive policy change,” she says.

The induction ceremony will be held on January 17, 2020, during the Society for Social Work and Research annual conference in Washington, D.C. Lightfoot will join two School of Social Work colleagues who have received this honor, Professor Rosalie Kane, who was inducted into the academy in 2012, and Professor Emeritus Jeffrey Edleson, who was inducted in 2011.