Our faculty have a wide range of interest areas, which we’ve summarized into the following areas:
Health and Healthcare
Our faculty examine health and healthcare from a variety of perspectives. We are home to experts that study topics such as health disparities, experiences of healthcare workers and caregiving, vaccine hesitancy, crime and incarceration as a public health issue, and environmental health issues. These faculty use a range of qualitative and quantitative approaches to learn more about the complex factors influencing individual, community, and societal health trends.
Faculty experts: Laura Heinemann, Alexander Roedlach, Kevin Estep, Cristina Pop, LaShaune Johnson, Erin Blankenship-Sefczek, Eric Meyer.
Inequality and Social Justice
Creighton’s Jesuit mission implores us to pursue justice and this is reflected across our research areas. The primary axes of inequality in contemporary society–race, social class, and gender–provide the foundation for many of our research questions related to other themes. Likewise, we aim for our research to make an impact of these inequalities.
Faculty experts: Everyone.
Environment and Sustainability
Our faculty see environmental issues as connected to social problems. For example, climate change, pollution, and resource extraction have uneven impacts across our communities and the world, disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable. Our faculty can partner with local agencies who want to think critically about how their environmental practices and policies influence the most vulnerable. We are also studying the variation in how Catholic dioceses communicate about climate change and other topics, a project with implications for the Catholic Church.
Faculty experts: Ryan Wishart, Angela Lederach, Pierce Greenberg, Sabrina Danielsen, Dan DiLeo, Renzo Rosales.
Criminal Justice
Our focus on criminal justice is comprehensive: examining aspects of law enforcement, victim advocacy, youth intervention, and incarceration. Our faculty wrote the book on “mission-based” policing and have conducted research at youth correctional facilities.
Faculty experts: Dawn Irlbeck, Rebecca Murray, Eric Meyer.
Applied Research and Social Services
Applied research projects, program evaluation, and consulting for social services organizations are central to our mission. We have partnered with local non-profit organizations to help enhance their contributions to the community and raise awareness about the issues that matter most to them.
Faculty experts: Cathy Fox, Alexander Roedlach, LaShaune Johnson.
