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Topic: Social Work

Kristen Atkinson

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Kristen Atkinson, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Department of Social Work at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Her areas of expertise include positive youth development, community youth development, youth civic engagement, youth leadership development and participatory research. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs, mostly overseeing clinical work.

Prior to teaching at MSU Denver, Atkinson taught a social research course to incoming graduate social work students at DePaul University. She was also a technical assistant in the College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago for a project called “Permanency Enhancement Project: A Community Initiative to Address Racial Disproportionality in Child Welfare.” Atkinson was also a graduate research assistant in the same department for nearly five years. She still works there as a visiting assistant professor teaching graduate courses mainly in Youth Development Theory, Participatory Action Research, and Program Development. In fall 2012, Atkinson coordinated the annual Youth Development Summit, a one-day conference for youth development professionals. She has served as a member of the Board of Directors at the Chicago Freedom School. Atkinson is currently a member of The Council on Social Work Education, The Association for Community Organization and Social Administration, and the Society for Research on Adolescence.

She has published her work titled “Trauma-Informed Care and Youth Development.” Her most recent research was a participatory research study at the Chicago Freedom School. It explores youth participation in a liberatory education program and the development of activism around social justice issues.

Atkinson received her doctorate in Social Work from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2012, a Master of Social Work from San Francisco State University in 2003 and a bachelor’s in Social Work from Eastern Michigan University in 2000.

AnnJanette Alejano-Steele

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AnnJanette Alejano-Steele, Ph.D., is a professor in the department of health professions and the interim associate vice president for the Office of Graduate Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Her health psychology expertise is focused on local and global multicultural issues, including reproductive health access for low-income populations, and comprehensive health services for victims of human trafficking.

Alejano-Steele has been teaching at MSU Denver since 1996, where she is tenured in the Departments of Psychology and Women’s Studies. Alejano-Steele served as interim chair of the Department of Social Work and was director of Gender Institute for Teaching and Advocacy from 2006 to 2009. She created and coordinated the Human Trafficking Academic Response Team, which consists of ten academic departments designed to provide wrap around academic services for survivors of human trafficking as a form of long-term survivorship.

Alejano-Steele serves on the steering committee of the victim services-focused Colorado Network to End Human Trafficking and on a key investigative taskforce led by the State of Colorado Division of Criminal Justice. She also serves on a national working group focusing on trauma-informed care for the Office of Women’s Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

She is co-founder of the Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking (LCHT) and co-author of “The Colorado Project to Comprehensively Combat Human Trafficking,” a groundbreaking three-year LCHT study that examined how the state is responding to trafficking. She is currently coordinating a national project on promising practices in human trafficking.

Alejano-Steele received her doctorate in psychology from Michigan State University, NIH-supported postdoctoral work in psychology and medicine from the University of California, San Francisco.

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