Meezan named dean of Ohio State’s College of Social Work

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Scanning electron micrograph image of the surface of a lotus leaf. Ohio State University engineers are using the bumpy leaf as a model for slick, water-repellent surfaces. The species of lotus shown here is Nelumba nucifera. Image courtesy of Ohio State University.

COLUMBUS -- Executive Vice President and Provost Barbara R. Snyder has recommended to President Karen A. Holbrook the appointment of William Meezan as dean of Ohio State’s College of Social Work, effective July 1. Holbrook will ask the university’s Board of Trustees to approve the appointment at its Feb. 4 meeting.

Meezan comes to Ohio State from the University of Michigan, where he is the Marion Elizabeth Blue Chair in Children and Families in the School of Social Work.

“Professor Meezan is highly regarded as an outstanding scholar and has co-authored four books and a number of monographs and co-edited three other volumes; and his work has been published in prestigious journals in the field,” Holbrook said. “In addition, he has taught at the doctoral, master’s and undergraduate levels and has chaired or served on committees related to curricula at all levels. Moreover, he conveyed his strong enthusiasm for working with our faculty.”

At the University of Michigan, he holds the first endowed chair in the School of Social Work and serves on the school’s executive committee. At the university level, he is a member of the Academic Affairs Advisory Committee and the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs. He is a participatory program evaluator, engaged with several funding agencies, including the state of Michigan. His current research concerns the impact of a performance-based funding approach on the delivery of foster care services in Wayne County (Detroit), Michigan. The work has been funded through grants from a number of sources, including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Skillman Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Michigan Nonprofit Research Program, the State of Michigan, and a number of offices at the University of Michigan.

Meezan has served as a consultant to the American Bar Association, the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse and the Child Welfare League of America, and for foundations to assist them with strategic planning and decisions related to grant making. He has also been an officer of the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education is the Secretary of the Society for Social Work and Research and to the ANSWER coalition.

Meezan was a Congressional Science Fellow, Society for Research in Child Development and the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 1984-85. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Lithuania and helped to start the country’s first School of Social Work from 1994-95, and returned to Lithuania in 2000 to teach students from nine former Soviet Republics. Among his many awards, in 2000 he received the Outstanding Research Award from the Society of Social Work and Research; and in 1997, the Distinguished Faculty Award, Los Amigos de la Humanidad, from the University of Southern California.

“Bill has vision and energy, and I am looking forward to working with him as we move forward with the ambitious agenda of our Academic Plan,” Snyder said.

Meezan earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology at the University of Vermont, his master’s in social work at Florida State University, and a doctorate of social welfare and certificate in advanced social welfare at Columbia University. Prior to joining the Michigan faculty in 1999, Meezan was on the faculty of the University of Southern California, which he joined in 1988 as the John Milner Professor of Child Welfare. Before leaving for USC in 1988, he rose through the ranks at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Jane Addams College of Social Work, attaining tenure in 1981 and the rank of full professor in 1986.

“I am absolutely delighted to accept the appointment as dean of Ohio State’s College of Social Work,” Meezan said. “The college, under Dean Tony Tripodi’s leadership, has made great strides and is now poised to move into the elite ranks of the very top schools of social work in the United States. I look forward to working with the faculty, staff and students at the college to help it realize this potential.”

A search committee, chaired by Nancy H. Rogers, dean of the Michael E. Moritz College of Law, and appointed by Snyder, conducted a national search to seek applications for the dean position.