Dear CSSW Community,
I am delighted to share the wonderful news that Dr. Desmond Upton Patton, the Brian and Randi Schwartz University Professor and PIK University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice, will be Columbia School of Social Work’s 2025 commencement speaker.
Dr. Patton is no stranger to our CSSW community as he is a former highly respected and beloved faculty member. In his current faculty role at Penn, he has joint appointments at the School of Social Policy & Practice and the Annenberg School for Communication, and secondary appointments in Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
A leading voice in the fusion of social work, communications, and data science, Dr. Patton is a trailblazer in exploring how grief, trauma, and violence unfold in digital spaces. He is the most cited scholar in the field of social media and gun violence and the creator of the Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM), a groundbreaking method that centers culture and context in AI. His widely acclaimed research, including a landmark study in Nature Digital Medicine identifying grief as a driver of aggressive communication on Twitter, has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and Vice News. Dr. Patton’s work has earned him recognition as a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a 2023 Obama Foundation USA Leader, a Mozilla Rise 25 Change Agent, and a RockHealth Top 50 in Digital Health. He serves on Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council and Axon’s Ethical and Equity Council, shaping the future of AI with empathy, inclusion, and justice at the core.
I have had the pleasure to learn from and work alongside Dr. Patton as dean – and most recently have found inspiration and hope around the way in which he frames the concept of intentional joy as we navigate our personal and professional lives. I am overjoyed to be able to welcome him back to CSSW as our 2025 Commencement Speaker.
In community,
Melissa
