Joseph W. Check, Ph.D. is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership in the Graduate College of Education, University of Massachusetts, Boston. He completed his B.A. at Boston College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English at Tufts University. His prior publications include Politics, Language, and Culture: A Critical Look at Urban School Reform (Praeger, 2002), co-editorship of Writing Within School Reform, a monograph series of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, and book chapters and articles on literacy, practitioner inquiry, and urban school reform. He has supervised dissertations in school reform, professional development, literacy, home/school interactions, and special education. He has served as Principal or Co-Principal Investigator for numerous grant-funded professional development programs including a 4-year, $4M practitioner inquiry project in 14 urban school districts, funded by the DeWitt-Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation. He is an experienced classroom instructor in master’s and doctoral level research courses.
Russell K. Schutt, PhD, is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he received the 2007 Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Service and taught from 1979 to 2022. He is also a Clinical Research Scientist I at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a Lecturer (part-time) in the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. He completed his BA, MA, and PhD degrees at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Sociology of Social Control Training Program at Yale University (where he met Dan). In addition to ten editions of Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research and one of Understanding the Social World, as well as coauthored versions for the fields of social work, criminal justice, psychology, and education, his other books include Homelessness, Housing, and Mental Illness (2011), Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society (coedited, 2015), and Organization in a Changing Environment (1986). He has authored and coauthored more than 65 peer reviewed journal articles, as well as book chapters and research reports on homelessness, mental health, organizations, law, and teaching research methods. His currently a Dual Principal Investigator (with Matcheri Keshavan, MD) in randomized comparative effectiveness trial of two socially-oriented interventions to improve community functioning among persons diagnosed with serious mental illness, funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). His other recently concluded research includes co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded study of the social impact of the pandemic in Boston, and co-investigator on a Veterans Health Administration-funded study of peer support. His earlier research has been funded by the National Cancer Institute, the Veterans Health Administration, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Fetzer Institute, and state agencies. Details are available at https://blogs.umb.edu/russellkschutt/.
