Thomas Byrne is an Associate Professor at the Boston College School of Social Work, having joined the faculty in 2025. He believes that access to safe, stable and decent housing is a fundamental prerequisite for a fulfilling and dignified life. This conviction motivates his scholarship, which focuses broadly on the causes, consequences, and policy solutions to housing insecurity and homelessness.

Indrani Saran is Associate Professor of the Practice, Behavioral Research/Biostatistics at Boston College School of Social Work. Dr. Saran’s research draws on theories in behavioral economics and applies economic methods to understand how people make health decisions, particularly in the context of weak health systems. The goal is to better understand how to increase uptake of effective health technologies. Her research has focused on evaluating strategies to expand the access and use of malaria diagnosis and treatment tools in East Africa.

Jessica K. M. Johnson, PhD, MPA, LCSW, studies poverty and homelessness prevention. She is currently coordinating a research-practice partnership between Boston College School of Social Work, United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley, FamilyAid Boston, and Boston Public Schools to evaluate the impact of an early family homelessness prevention intervention. She also has a longstanding interest in strategies to expand access to social security in rural parts of low-income countries.

Gautam N. Yadama is Professor and the Dean of Boston College School of Social Work. His research is focused on understanding poverty and environment dynamics, and interventions to address the attendant social, economic, environment, and health outcomes. He has implemented a randomized control trial to study the sustainability of new and efficient energy technologies in rural India to reduce household air pollution and improve health and wellbeing of women and children. His book, Fires, Fuel & the Fate of 3 Billion: State of the Energy Impoverished (Oxford University Press), outlines an argument for transdisciplinary research to tackle complex problems such as household air pollution that reside at the intersections of poverty, environment, and health. He is using social network analysis and community based system dynamics to study how interventions to reduce pollution are adopted and sustained by the poor in rural India. He is a member of the Implementation Science Network on Clean Cooking at the Fogarty Institute of the National Institutes of Health, USA.