American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare

Gautam N. Yadama

Active | Inducted in 2022

Current Position

Board Member

Bio

Gautam N. Yadama is Dean of Boston College School of Social Work, Boston College. A significant thrust of his work is concerned with understanding and intervening in resource-poor communities to improve social, health, economic, livelihood, and quality of life outcomes. He is a member of the Implementation Science Network (ISN) at the Fogarty Institute of the National Institutes of Health, USA.

Yadama serves on the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health.The Commission aims to reduce air, soil, and water pollution by communicating the extraordinary health and economic costs of pollution globally, providing actionable solutions to policy-makers, and dispelling the myth of pollution’s inevitability. Yadama’s book Fires, Fuel and the Fate of 3 Billion: State of the Energy Impoverished (Oxford University Press) outlines an argument for transdisciplinary research to tackle complex problems at the intersections of poverty and the environment and health.

In collaboration with the Open Society Foundation, he was instrumental in training several cohorts (1999-2014) of young social welfare and social work professionals from Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and the Republic of Georgia. He is also the principal investigator of the Early Homelessness Intervention and Prevention (EHIP) program funded by the William T. Grant Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. It is a partnership between the United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley, FamilyAid Boston, and the Boston Public Schools.