User:Dadams-santos/sandbox/Celeste Watkins-Hayes

Celeste Watkins-Hayes is the Associate Vice President for Research and Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is a leading scholar of urban poverty, social policy, and HIV/AIDS.

Academic Biography
Celeste Watkins-Hayes is the Associate Vice President for Research and Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. As the Associate Vice President of Research, Watkins-Hayes oversees social science- and humanities-based research centers and institutes. She also recently created the ASCEND program, an initiative that supports high-achieving senior faculty members in pursuing their strategic priorities. Watkins-Hayes is a former chair of the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern. She also served on the board of trustees at Spelman College for over a decade, where she assumed various leadership roles and led the search to identify the college’s 10th president. Watkins-Hayes currently sits on the board of directors of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Watkins-Hayes is a nationally-recognized scholar and expert on urban poverty, social policy, and HIV/AIDS. She is a faculty fellow at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research (IPR) and Cells to Society (C2S): The Center on Social Disparities and Health. Watkins-Hayes holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Harvard University and a B.A. from Spelman College, where she graduated summa cum laude. Her book, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, analyzes the transformation of the AIDS epidemic and is based on interviews with over 100 female AIDS activists, policy officials, advocates, and women living with HIV/AIDS who have been on the front lines of this fight. In addition to her academic articles and essays, Watkins-Hayes has published pieces in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Chicago Magazine.

Dr. Watkins-Hayes’ intellectual commitments are motivated by a desire to offer analyses and prescriptions, based on empirically- and conceptually-rich research, that address the real-world issues that limit human potential. Her scholarship, therefore, speaks directly to current policy debates.

Research
Watkins-Hayes’s research focuses on urban poverty; social policy; HIV/AIDS; non-profit and government organizations; and race, class, and gender. Her first book, The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2009), is an ethnographic analysis of the implementation of welfare reform on the front lines of service delivery. "It investigates how the professional, racial, class, and community identities of welfare caseworkers and supervisors shape the implementation of policy and other organizational dynamics. Study findings indicate that while welfare reform changed the job descriptions of front-line staff members (from eligibility-compliance claims processors to welfare-to-work caseworkers), these agencies were largely unable to undertake the steps necessary to change employees’ professional identities."

Dr. Watkins-Hayes is currently Principal Investigator of the Health, Hardship, and Renewal Study, which explores the economic and social survival strategies of a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse group of women living with HIV/AIDS in the Chicago area. Watkins-Hayes received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Investigator Award and a National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award to conduct this research. Her second book, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality, was published by the University of California Press (August 2019). Dr. Watkins-Hayes has been profiled in ESSENCE magazine, USA Today Weekend magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times. She has been widely quoted in the popular press as a national expert on social inequality; HIV/AIDS; and race, class, and gender.

Honors
In 2018, Watkins-Hayes received the E. LeRoy Hall Award for Excellence in Teaching, which is the highest teaching award given by Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her first book, The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2009), was a Finalist for the 2009 C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the 2011 Max Weber Book Award from the American Sociological Association. Watkins-Hayes received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Investigator Award and a National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award to conduct research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic.