Brendan Saloner
Brendan Saloner graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in December 2005 with a double-major in Philosophy and Political Economy of Industrial Societies (High Honors). During the 2004 academic year, he attended the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where he completed advanced coursework in South African public policy and history, and served as a research assistant in the Politics Department. Brendan returned to South Africa in June 2005 and conducted independent research for his honor's thesis on behavioral health services for high-risk youth in two low-income communities. As a part of this research, Brendan conducted several focus groups with youth in the service system, interviewed caseworkers and mental health professionals, and administered a a detailed risk-behavior survey with 196 ninth graders. After graduating, Brendan worked as a research assistant at the Urban Institute in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Populations. While at the Urban Institute, Brendan assisted with multi-year evaluations of federal workforce development and social welfare programs, including the High Growth Job Training Initiative, for which he created an extensive outcomes-tracking database and the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, for which he assisted with fieldwork-based research. Brendan was one author of an extensive bibliography on the welfare of vulnerable populations after Hurricane Katrina. Brendan entered the PhD program in Health Policy in 2007, with a traineeship from the National Institute of Mental Health. His current research interests include the psychosocial and psychomoral development of youth at risk, the allocation of mental health resources in low-income settings, social epidemiology, and participatory approaches to research. To contact: bsaloner@fas.harvard.edu