Laura Abrams

Dr. Laura AbramsLaura Abrams, a professor in the department of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, has been named the next dean of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Abrams, who will begin work on July 1, will also be appointed as the David Lawrence Stein/Violet Goldberg Sachs Professor of Mental Health.

Abrams earned her undergraduate degree at Brandeis University and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in social welfare from the University of California, Berkeley.

She has written five books and two monographs focusing on incarcerated youth, pathways to civic engagement and racial justice. She has received numerous awards for her scholarship, including the 2020 Society for Social Work and Research best scholarly book award for her 2017 book, Everyday Desistance: The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth, co-written with Diane J. Terry, and the Frank R. Bruel prize for the best published article in Social Service Review, “Juvenile Justice at a Crossroads: Science, Evidence, and Twenty-First Century Reform” (2013). In addition, she and her colleagues and trainees have authored more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications.

In 2022, Abrams was appointed to the inaugural Faculty Mentoring Honor Society at UCLA, and this year received the California Social Welfare Archives’ Frances Lomas Feldman Award for excellence in social work education. In 2016, she became an elected fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and a fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research.