News / May 18, 2026

Recap: Doctoral Student Networking Event

On May 18, 2026, the SIG hosted its first Doctoral Student Networking Event, a 90-minute Zoom session for doctoral students working at the intersection of data science, AI, and social work. The event was co-sponsored with the Grand Challenges for Social Work Harnessing Technology for Social Good (HTSG) initiative and hosted by Lauri Goldkind (Fordham), Nari Yoo (University of Michigan), and Cheng Ren (University at Albany, SUNY).

Why this event

Doctoral students in this space often work alone. Many programs have one or two students using computational methods, and most of the people who would understand their work are at other institutions. Conferences help, but they are one week a year. This session was built to create connections between conferences.

Format

After a short opening on the HTSG grand challenge and the SIG’s work, participants moved through two 30-minute breakout rounds organized around four self-selected tracks:

1. AI as a research topic: adoption, perceptions, and impacts of AI on practice, education, or clients, studied with survey, qualitative, and mixed methods
2. AI and data science as methods: NLP, machine learning, LLMs, and geospatial methods applied to social work questions
3. AI ethics, policy, and regulation: algorithmic bias, data governance, and regulation in child welfare, criminal justice, and adjacent systems
4. AI for social work education and training: curriculum integration, field education, and evaluation of AI-assisted learning

Each room ran a quick round of intros, a facilitated discussion, and a takeaways segment, with themes reported back to the main room between rounds.

What’s next

The SIG meets next at the SSWR Annual Conference in Washington, DC (January 2027), with additional online events planned through the year. The best way to hear about them is to join the member directory, which is the list we use for announcements.