Drs. Schwalbe, Witte, and Wu Promoted to Full Professor

The Columbia School of Social Work congratulates three faculty members who have been promoted by the Trustees of Columbia University to full professorships: Craig Schwalbe, Susan Witte, and Elwin Wu.

With over a decade of experience in direct practice and social welfare administration, Craig S. Schwalbe has focused his scholarship on minimizing the use of detention and incarceration for justice-involved youth. His research has been funded by UNICEF and the WT Grant Foundation, and he is a recipient of the William T. Grant Scholars Award, where he worked on a project called “Social Processes in Juvenile Probation.” He has published 41 articles in peer-reviewed journals and is a contributing author for the 10th edition of the textbook Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skills.

Dr. Schwalbe teaches practice skills in foundation-year courses and advanced clinical practice skills in the second-year curriculum. He holds a BA from Concordia College, an MSW from Augsburg College, and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Born and raised during the second wave of feminism, Susan S. Witte has dedicated her research to assisting women with their sexual and reproductive health, including HIV/STI prevention and co-occurring issues such as childhood and adult trauma, substance and alcohol use, partner violence, and poverty. She has authored or co-authored 80 articles and six book chapters, and her research has been funded by NIMH, NIAAA, NIDA, and CDC.

Dr. Witte works both locally and globally. Currently, she is examining the impact of enhancing provider-level collaboration and referrals across HIV services programs in New York. and she recently released her findings on an intervention she designed to reduce the risk of HIV infection among Mongolian women who engage in street-based sex work. For that intervention she collaborated with colleagues to test the benefit of adding financial literacy, business development, and microsavings components to HIV prevention.

Within the School of Social Work, Dr. Witte served for 15 years as the associate director of the Social Intervention Group (SIG), having been a faculty affiliate since 2014. She joined the faculty of the Global Health Research Center of Central Asia (GHRCCA) at its inception in 2007.

Dr. Witte’s direct practice experience includes working in agencies that provide support to survivors of child and adult sexual violence as well as those that provide the spectrum of HIV/AIDS prevention, education, and treatment services. She teaches in the clinical and advanced generalist methods of the master’s and doctoral programs.

Dr. Witte holds a BA from Duke University, an MSW from the University of Connecticut, and a PhD from the Columbia School of Social Work.

With a belief in social justice for people often regarded as outcasts, Dr. Elwin Wu leads groundbreaking research on drug-involved men and women, men who have sex with men, and offenders (whom he defines as individuals whose behaviors jeopardize others’ well-being). With a background in both social work and biology, he examines the nexus of drug abuse, partner violence, and HIV in both the United States and Central Asia and has authored or co-authored 70 papers.

Dr. Wu is also a talented research trainer. As director of the HIV Intervention Science Training Program, he supports the experiences and career trajectories of up-and-coming minority researchers who are building careers in sociobehavioral research.

Also within the Columbia School of Social Work, he co-directs the Social Intervention Group (SIG) and the Global Health Research Center of Central Asia (GHRCCA), and is a director of the Training, HIV, Substance Abuse, and Criminal Justice Fellowship Program.

Dr. Wu holds a BS in Biology from Case Western University, an MS from the Columbia School of Social Work, and a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Harvard University.

Please join us in celebrating this high achievement.