BCSSW student receives Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Award

Boston College School of Social Work doctoral candidate Christopher Baidoo, who studies the impact of public policies on marginalized populations, has been selected as one of 12 recipients for the 2025 Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Awards.

Formerly known as the Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Fellowships, the Emerging Scholar Awards support promising researchers in their final year of writing a doctoral dissertation examining a salient aspect of violence. Areas of research may be related to topics such as war, crime, terrorism, family and intimate partner relationships, political extremism and nationalism, climate instability and natural resource competition, and racial, ethnic, and religious conflict.

Baidoo’s topic is “Do Legal Interventions Save Lives? Evaluating Their Impact on Fatal Police Encounters and Racial Disparities.”

“It’s gratifying to have your research recognized by such a renowned charitable foundation that is dedicated to addressing violence and its ramifications,” said Baidoo, who previously worked for 11 years at California Western School of Law in areas of admission, enrollment management, and institutional research. “Being a Ph.D. candidate, an honor like this is an acknowledgement that you’re on the right path and means you can focus intently on completing your dissertation.

“I see the Emerging Scholar Award as helping to disseminate your work, and to probe emerging, urgent issues that impact lives.”

Baidoo’s project involves evaluating three legal interventions—state-level legalization of marijuana; the elimination of qualified immunity for police officers; and Justice Department intervention in local police departments with patterns or practices of unconstitutional policing—and examining how these may have affected police-civilian encounters that resulted in civilian’s death. He also will scrutinize the racial dimensions of these incidents.  

This analysis will build on previous research, and in doing so, offer a more comprehensive assessment of the interventions’ impact on police-civilian encounters, he said.

Baidoo acknowledges that topics related to police conduct toward civilians, especially if there is a racial component, often trigger intense public and political debates. He said he is not seeking to inflame the discussion but rather to inform it.

“The fact is, there are approximately 1,000 fatal civilian encounters with police each year, and proportionally, Black and Hispanic civilians are over-represented,” he said. “I’m not saying all fatal encounters are due to racial animus or discrimination by police. The subject I’m exploring is not implicitly about bias individual police officers might have. You could theoretically correct for that and still have racial disparities in police encounters. So I’m examining how structures such as laws and policies may influence racial differences.”

In that context, explains Baidoo, the public policy angle is key to his research, since the legal interventions create a set of conditions and circumstances in which police operate. “If we find that, for example, legalizing marijuana is consistent with a drop in fatal police-civilian encounters, perhaps that’s a reason more states should consider legalizing it,” he said.

The elimination of qualified immunity—protection from civil lawsuits—for police officers might be even more impactful in police-civilian encounters, according to Baidoo. Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico are the only states that have eliminated the policy, although Massachusetts, California, Washington, D.C., and New York City have imposed limitations on it. Police officers in these settings may be more mindful of ways to avoid potentially fatal encounters, he said.

“The goal is to test the efficacy of legal interventions that influence police-civilian encounters, and to get that into the hands of policymakers,” said Baidoo. “These structural interventions are generally broader in impact, offering the most potential for reducing fatal incidents, which everyone would agree is a worthwhile outcome.”

Being named a recipient of an Emerging Scholar Award adds to an already eventful year for Baidoo, who earlier received a summer fellowship from the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, a research and policy center at Harvard University that encourages graduate students to spend part of their careers in public service. He worked in the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate, which strives to ensure state agencies deliver quality care to youths. He examined initiatives in Massachusetts aimed at protecting children from sexual abuse in the digital world, focusing on issues such as online grooming and exposure to inappropriate content, and presented policy recommendations to the agency.

 “The fellowship opened my eyes to how policy works in practice,” he said. “That experience underscored the importance of talking to people who are on the ground, dealing with these compelling social issues on a day-in/day-out basis. It’s something I am keeping in mind as I continue to work on my dissertation.”

Baidoo holds a bachelor of social work degree from James Madison University, a master of social work degree from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and a juris doctorate from California Western School of Law.