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 of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston; Clinical Research Scientist I at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; and 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 his postdoctoral fellowship in the Sociology of Social Control Training Program at Yale University. In addition to co-authoring The Practice of Research in Criminology and Criminal Justice and Fundamentals of Research in Criminology and Criminal Justice (with Ronet Bachman), he is the author of Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research and Understanding the Social World: Research Methods for the 21st Century, and co-author of Making Sense of the Social World (with Dan Chambliss), Research Methods in Psychology (with Paul G. Nestor), The Practice of Research in Social Work and Fundamentals of Social Work Research (with Ray Engel), and Research Methods in Education (with Joseph Check), all with SAGE Publications, as well as author of Homelessness, Housing, and Mental Illness and Organization in a Changing Environment, coeditor of Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society and of The Organizational Response to Social Problems, and coauthor of Responding to the Homeless: Policy and Practice. He has authored and coauthored more than 65 peer-reviewed journal articles as well as many book chapters and research reports on homelessness, mental health, service preferences and satisfaction, organizations, and the sociology of law. His current and most recent research includes a $200,000 National Science Foundation-funded study of the social impact of the pandemic in Boston, with collaborators at the Center for Survey Research (UMass Boston) and Northeastern University, a $3.8 million 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) at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center with collaborators at the Harvard Medical School, and a $1 million Veterans Health Administration-funded study of peer support with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the VA. His past 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/.
