Deborah Padgett is a Professor at NYU Silver. She is internationally known for her mentorship and advocacy of qualitative and mixed methods in research. She is the editor of The Handbook of Ethnicity, Aging, and Mental Health (1995) and The Qualitative Research Experience (2004), author of Qualitative Methods in Social Work Research (3rd ed., 2016) and Qualitative and Mixed Methods in Public Health (2012), and co-author of Program Evaluation (6th ed., 2015). This expertise led to her appointment to an Institute of Medicine panel examining veterans’ mental health (2012-2017).
Dr. Padgett’s book Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Changing Systems and Transforming Lives (2016, Oxford University Press) (with co-authors Benjamin Henwood and Sam Tsemberis) documents the rise of a ‘paradigm’ shifting approach to addressing homelessness in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Padgett has lectured widely on the topic in Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Canada, and India.
Dr. Padgett has been co-principal investigator on several National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) funded grants and a National Cancer Institute funded mixed methods study of African-American women and breast cancer screening; she was also national co-director of the Screening Adherence Follow-up (SAFe) project funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She became principal investigator of two R01 qualitative methods studies funded by NIMH. The first, The New York Services Study (2004-2008), was a $1.4 million study of service engagement among dual diagnosed homeless adults in New York City. The second, the New York Recovery Study (2010-2015; $1.9 million) used ethnographic methods to examine the role of housing in mental health recovery among formerly homeless adults. Her ethnographic research on homeless ‘pavement dwellers’ in Delhi, India, is an extension of this interest in homelessness to cross-cultural contexts. Since 2015, she has worked closely with The Banyan, an organization in Chennai, India that assists homeless mentally ill women.
Dr. Padgett received the NYU Distinguished Teaching Award (2012) and was Director of the PhD program in Global Public Health (2014-2016). She was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW) in 2011 and a Fellow of the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) in 2013. She has been active in SSWR since its inception and served as a board member (2002-2007) and President (2004-2006). In 2006, SSWR announced the Deborah K. Padgett Early Career Award in recognition of her contributions.
She holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and received post-doctoral training in public health and psychiatric epidemiology at Columbia University and Duke University, respectively. She earned her MA in anthropology at Florida State University and her BA at the University of Kentucky.