Department of Social Work

New Social Work Faculty

Mr. Fei Sun received his MA in sociology from Nanking University in China and comes to us via the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, where he received is MSW and is completing his Ph.D. He is interested in social gerontology, research methods and statistics, program planning and evaluation, and social policy and will be teaching social policy courses. His research interests include dementia caregiving, health, and social services utilization. He has worked on several research projects and has publications on family caregiving and dementia; widowhood, religiosity, and well-being; agitation in nursing home residents; and family caregiving in a rural Chinese village. He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation, "Rural/Urban Differences in Formal Service Use by Older Adults: The Roles of Structural and Cultural Factors."

Mr. Jeffrey Lacasse received his MSW in 2000 and is completing his doctorate in the College of Social Work at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he is currently a full-time lecturer. He has won several campus-wide awards for teaching and research. His research interests include mental health, psychiatric medications in social work practice/policy, and social work education. He is completing his dissertation, which examines psychiatric polypharmacy in a state hospital. Jeffrey has previously published articles on the consumer advertising of antidepressants and mental health education in social work. He will be teaching social policy when he joins the faculty in August.

Dr. Joanne Cacciatore will be joining the faculty as an assistant professor after serving as the department's Title IV-E Coordinator for two years. She completed her MSW at Arizona State and her Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in Human Sciences where her dissertation was entitled "A Phenomenological Exploration of Sudden Interuterine Infant Death and the Effects of Ritualization on Maternal Anxiety and Depression." Dr. Cacciatore's passion is for issues of death and dying, especially the death of children, topics that she has presented on extensively nationally. She is the founder of the M.I.S.S. Foundation, an international nonprofit agency with 77 chapters around the world, dedicated to providing support to grieving individuals and families, as well as advocacy, education and research on death-related issues. In 2007 she received the prestigious Hon Kachina award for her extensive volunteer activities. Her publications have focused on death and dying issues such as stillbirth and complicated bereavement. She will teach courses on human behavior and the social environment and death and dying.