Tyreasa Washington
Associate Professor, Department of Social Work, Director of African American Families and Kinship Care Lab
Dr. Tyreasa Washington is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). She is a faculty affiliate to the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, faculty affiliate to the UNCG Gerontology Program, and the founding director of the African American Families and Kinship Care Lab. Dr. Washington is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) who has worked in child welfare and mental health settings. She is among a handful of scholars who examine the impact of family-level factors on African American children’s social, academic, and behavioral outcomes who reside in kinship care (e.g., grandparents raising grandchildren). Additionally, she explores the impact of resources and policies on kinship care families, as well as caregivers’ mental and physical health.
An extension of Dr. Washington’s work on African American kinship care families in the United States (US) is the exploration of the historic and contemporary use of kinship care among African American and Black families in the US, Ghana, and South Africa. Her research agenda also includes the examination of fathers’ roles on children’s positive outcomes. Dr. Washington has received various research and teaching awards for her scholarship. For example, she is a Council on Social Work Education Minority Fellowship Alumna, the Thomas Undergraduate Research Mentor Award recipient, and the Mary Frances Stone Teaching Excellence Award recipient. Currently, Dr. Washington is the Principal Investigator of two Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) funded studies, one entitled: “Family’s Impact on the Development of African American Children in Kinship Care” and the other entitled: “Reducing Alzheimer’s Risk among African-American Kinship Caregivers.” Dr. Washington earned her BSW from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, MSW from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago