Trained as both a social worker and public health researcher, Kyaien O. Conner (PhD, SSW ’08, MPH, BCHS ’07), has developed a career focused on understanding how individual health is connected to families, communities and the broader systems around them. Now, as dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work and a Pitt Public Health alumna, she sees an opportunity to bring those perspectives together in new ways.
Conner’s interest in mental health is deeply personal. Growing up with a family member with severe and persistent mental illness, she witnessed her family struggle to find culturally sensitive services that addressed not only the symptoms of mental illness, but also the social, environmental and political context surrounding her loved one’s life.
“I came to Pitt to be the kind of provider that I always wished my family member had,” Conner said.
When Conner arrived at Pitt as an undergraduate in 1998, she planned to become a psychiatrist. She majored in psychology and Africana studies, trying to bring together her interest in mental health with an understanding of culture and community. She had never heard of social work until several graduate programs encouraged her to consider it.
A conversation with the late Larry Davis, then dean of the School of Social Work, changed the direction of her career.
“I told him about my interests, my goals, what I really wanted to do,” Conner said. “And he was like, ‘This is your home. You’re meant to be here.’”
Conner began Pitt’s MSW program in 2002. As she watched Davis develop the Center on Race and Social Problems, she began to see that clinical practice could be only one part of the impact she wanted to make.
“It was the first time I thought, well, maybe being a clinician is just a piece of what I want to do,” she said. “Maybe there’s a pathway where I can have an even bigger impact.”
Her path eventually brought her to Pitt Public Health, where a connection between Davis and Stephen Thomas, then director of the Center for Minority Health (now the Center for Health Equity), introduced Conner to public health and helped shape the next stage of her education.
Thomas invited Conner to work with the center and exposed her to community-based research and population health. Through public health courses and experiences in Pittsburgh neighborhoods including Homewood and Wilkinsburg, she began to see mental health not only at the level of individuals and families, but within the larger communities and systems in which they live.
“I think for me, there certainly is a synergistic impact,” Conner said. “It’s not just like an additive effect. I think it’s like a duplicative exponential effect that when they come together, it’s bigger than the sum of the two independently.”
That perspective has shaped her research, including a five-year study funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute examining a peer-led intervention to reduce potentially avoidable hospital readmissions among older adults living with multiple chronic physical health conditions and a co-occurring psychiatric diagnosis.
The project brought together her understanding of healthcare systems, population health and community resources with her social work training in delivering interventions and supporting people in their communities.
“That grant is a really great example for me of how both my social work and public health hats came together in harmony that really uniquely prepared me to be the principal investigator of that kind of an award,” she said.
For Conner, that kind of collaboration is increasingly important as health and social challenges become more complex.
“Academic institutions, even Pitt, are unintentionally situated in a way that silos us,” she said. “And it’s very easy to find ourselves separated from other schools, other disciplines.”
Since returning to Pitt three years ago to lead the Center on Race and Social Problems — the center that had inspired her to pursue research — Conner has worked to build connections across the University. She has brought together leaders from centers focused on social and racial justice and has developed research collaborations with faculty in Pitt Public Health.
She sees those partnerships as an opportunity to bring different perspectives to the same problems rather than approaching them in isolation.
“We need the unique perspectives of the disciplines,” she said. “That’s really what’s going to be the solution to addressing some of our country’s most significant social and health-related challenges.”
Maureen Lichtveld, MD, MPH, dean of Pitt Public Health, sees opportunities for the two schools to build on those connections through research and education.
“The opportunities for collaboration between public health and social work are limitless,” Lichtveld said. “From research examining how to address rural health needs to educating the next generation of health professionals, we have the assets and expertise to transform challenges into opportunities. Dean Conner’s own professional trajectory is a powerful example of what can happen when we bring these disciplines together.”
For students, Conner believes that means looking beyond the boundaries of their own schools and seeking opportunities to learn from other disciplines.
“I really think that those opportunities are amazing,” she said, “really thinking about the unique roles and pieces that each of these different health sciences professions bring and how important they are in being able to understand a person, a community challenge from a more whole and robust way.”
-Clare Collins