Dr. Sean Joe

Dr. Sean Joe

Founder & Principal Director, HomeGrown StL

Sean Joe, PhD, MSW, joined the Brown School in Fall 2014 as the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development. Dr. Joe is a nationally recognized scholar on suicidal behavior among Black Americans, particularly regarding the role of firearms as a risk factor, and is expanding the evidence base for effective practice with Black boys and young men. His research focuses on Black adolescents’ mental health service use patterns, community science, and father-focus family-based interventions to prevent urban Black American adolescent males from engaging in multiple forms of self-destructive behaviors.

As founding Director of the Race and Opportunity Lab, which examines race, opportunity, and social mobility with an emphasis on informing policies, interventions, and intra-professional practice to lessen ethnic inequality in adolescents’ healthy transition to adulthood. The lab leading community science project is HomeGrown STL, which is a multisectoral placed-based capacity building intervention to generate new knowledge while simultaneously creating positive, real-world changes in the upward mobility opportunities and health of Black males ages 12-29 years in the St. Louis region. His epistemological work focuses on the concept of race in medical and social sciences.