CRECD Award - Student and Junior Faculty

Council on Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Diversity Award

Presented by the Council on Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Diversity (CRECD), this award recognizes doctoral students and junior faculty members with outstanding scholarship in the areas of racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in social work education. 

Junior Faculty Award Winner

Angie Wootton, PhD, MSW
Angie Wootton is an Assistant Professor of Social Welfare in the College of Integrated Health Sciences, and Affiliated Faculty of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. Dr. Wootton’s program of mixed methods research characterizes and seeks remedies to persistent mental and behavioral health disparities in the LGBTQ+ community, centering sexual minority women, transgender and gender expansive people, and those experiencing multiple forms of stigma, discrimination, and exclusion. Strengths, resilience, and trauma recovery focused approaches to LGBTQ+ mental and behavioral health are uplifted, especially long-standing traditions of LGBTQ+ community support, peer mental health support, and mutual aid.

Wootton’s 28 peer-reviewed journal articles on these topics have been cited by about 1,000 times by an international community of scholars and have received recognition for their impact on the field. Wootton’s current projects focus on translating research and theory on socially just and effective helping practices with LGBTQ+ communities into informative, actionable, and inspiring education and training materials for emerging and established helping professionals.

This work follows from Wootton’s previous direct practice career as a case manager, counselor, and social worker in settings including homeless shelters, transitional and permanent supported housing, HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ organizations, and hospitals in California.

PhD Student Award Winner

Sangmi Kim, MSW
Sangmi Kim, MSW is a PhD candidate in Social Work at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, expected Spring 2027, with a graduate minor through the Intercollegiate Graduate Statistics and Data Science Program. Her research focuses on suicidality, mental health, resilience, digital contexts, and data justice, with particular attention to at-risk and marginalized youth, young adults, immigrant communities, and racial and ethnic minority populations. Kim’s scholarship examines how psychological distress, stigma, and suicide risk are experienced, recognized, and addressed across diverse social and institutional contexts.

Her manuscript selected for the Council on Racial, Ethnic and Cultural Diversity Award examines stigma and suicidality among U.S. college students, with attention to differential indirect effects across racial and ethnic groups. Drawing on national college student survey data and moderated mediation analysis, this work highlights the importance of centering racial and ethnic diversity in suicide prevention, help-seeking, and mental health service engagement. Her broader research integrates machine learning, natural language processing, mixed methods, and community-engaged approaches to advance equity-informed social work research.

She leads projects on AI supported gatekeeping for Korean immigrant families, bilingual AI digital storytelling for mental health support, cyberbullying and adolescent suicidal ideation, and data justice in AI-based suicide risk prediction. Kim is a 2025–2027 CSWE Doctoral Student Policy Fellow and has received multiple recognitions for scholarship and service, including the 2026 Morton M. Silverman Student Award from the American Association of Suicidology and the University of Tennessee Graduate Student Research Award. Across her research and community work, she seeks to expand how social work recognizes distress, silence, resilience, and culturally grounded pathways to care.