Maria Joy Ferrera is an Associate Professor within DePaul University’s Department of Social Work and Co-Director for the Center for Community Health Equity, a partnership between DePaul and Rush University to promote health equity. She received her PhD and MA from the University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration (SSA) and her BS from Loyola University in Chicago. Having served for over 25 years as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in the areas of child welfare and medical social work, Dr. Ferrera continues to do work in the Filipinx American and other immigrant communities. Her areas of practice and research involve decolonization methods, ethnic identity development; community-engaged, socially just practices and research with racial and ethnic minority youth; health and mental health disparities among racial and ethnic minority communities. She is the Co-Founding Co-Chair of the The Coalition for Immigrant Mental Health (CIMH), a collaborative, community based and research informed initiative that is a partnership between immigrants regardless of status, mental health practitioners, community organizers, researchers, and allies. She is a Steering Committee Member of The Midwest Human Rights Consortium (MHRC) a referral network of multi-institutional and interdisciplinary professionals who perform trauma-informed forensic evaluations for individuals seeking asylum in the U.S. As a recent recipient of DePaul’s HumanitiesX Collaborative Fellowship, Dr. Ferrera is working in partnership with MHRC and Filmmaker/DePaul Associate Professor Dr. Chi Jang Yin to apply digital media and documentary filmmaking to promote human rights. Her transdisciplinary work has been published in Critical Public Health, Family and Community Health Journal, The Community Psychologist, Journal for Adolescent Research, and the Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work. As a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, her writing has also been published in The Hill and Latino Rebels. She is a co-investigator within the Immigrant Youth Project, a study that aims to highlight the narratives of young undocumented individuals and The Cultural Portals Study, which highlights the identity development narratives of second generation Filipinx young adults.

As the Executive Director of the Steans Center, Dr. Rosing oversees the work of Academic Service Learning and the Egan Office for Urban Education and Community Partnerships and supports DePaul’s partnership with the Asset-Based Community Development Institute.  He works with faculty to develop scholarship on service-learning and community-based research and serves as a faculty member in Community Service Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Geography, Sustainable Urban Development (MASUD) and Community Psychology. He also co-directs MASUD.  Dr. Rosing has taught and developed numerous service learning courses including Community Food Systems, Sustainable Urban Food Systems, and Geography, Food and Justice.  His teaching directly supports DePaul’s Minor in Food Studies and Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Urban Food Systems. Dr. Rosing is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on sustainable food systems development, urban food access, economic restructuring, and food justice movements in Chicago and the Dominican Republic.