Sean Joe
Research Fellow
sjoe@wustl.edu
Sean Joe is the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development and the founding and principal director of the Race and Opportunity Lab at the Washington University in St. Louis’ school of social work. He is the immediate past president of the Society for Social Work and Research and is a fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, the Society for Social Work and Research and the New York Academy of Medicine. He has also been an invited presenter for the Brookings Institution and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Joe’s current research examines race, opportunity and social mobility with an emphasis on informing policies, systems change interventions and intra-professional practices to lessen inequality in economic citizenship. Joe leads HomeGrown StL, the Race and Opportunity Lab's leading community science project, which is a multilevel, placed-based, community organizing intervention designed to enhance the economic mobility and health of Black youth and young men ages 12 to 29 in the St. Louis region.
His work investigates larger-scale policy experiments using data to examine wealth inequality and barriers to wealth-building opportunities for Black men, namely disparities in labor market outcomes and system-level factors in the region that affect economic conditions in low- and moderate-income communities and impact equity in economic mobility, earnings and capital access for Black workers.
Joe’s research has appeared in many well-known, peer-reviewed journals, including The Journal of American Medical Association, Journal of Social Work and Social Welfare, and the Review of Research in Education.
