Place and Well-Being: Issues of Policy & Practice

Where we live matters.

Join us for the next session in the Politics of Well-Being series, exploring the geography of well-being: how neighborhood infrastructure, environmental justice, urban design, and housing access shape physical and mental health. This conversation will examine how place-based policies can foster or undermine equitable outcomes — and how communities reclaim agency over space.

Featured Speakers:
🔹 Millan AbiNader, MSW, PhD – Assistant Professor, SP2
🔹 Alice Xu, PhD – Assistant Professor, SP2
🔹 Moderator: Rebecca Del Rossi, MSW

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Speaker Biographies:

Dr. Millan AbiNader is a mixed-methods researcher who seeks to understand the social ecology of gender-based violence, with particular attention to intimate partner violence-related fatalities. Dr. AbiNader also seeks to understand how one’s social and geographic position, like race or rurality, affects one’s experience of gender-based violence and investigates how organizational environment, like vicarious traumatization prevention policies, affects survivor-client experiences. Before entering academia, Dr. AbiNader worked as a community victim services advocate in the fields of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, family violence, and commercial sexual exploitation/trafficking. She delivered primary prevention interventions kindergarten through college, facilitated support groups in the community and in carceral settings, and delivered advocacy services to incarcerated women. Dr. AbiNader earned her MSSW from the University of Texas at Austin and her PhD in Social Work from Boston University where she completed an award-winning dissertation examining rural intimate partner homicide. Dr. AbiNader was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Arizona State University’s School of Social Work’s Office of Gender Based Violence under the mentorship of Dr. Jill Messing where she studied intimate partner homicide and risk assessment.

Dr. AbiNader’s current research projects investigate intimate partner violence-related fatalities, vicarious trauma, gender-based violence across contexts, and intimate partner violence among multi-racial/multi-ethnic individuals among other topics. She is the primary investigator of an NSF grant to study COVID-19 policies’ effects on homicide rates. Dr. AbiNader integrates her practice experience as a victim advocate and macro social worker with her research, aiming to lead studies that support survivor healing and perpetrator change.

Alice Xu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice and the Department of Political Science (secondary appointment). She studies the comparative political economy of development with a focus on the politics of inequality and social policy, urban and distributive politics, and environmental politics in the Global South. Her book project explores how patterns of class- and race-based segregation shapes urban and distributive politics across cities in Brazil and Mexico. She also has research interests in quantitative and spatial methods for studying inequality. Her research received the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Best Paper on Social and Economic Inequality award (Class and Inequality Section) in 2021 and APSA’s Paul A. Sabatier Best Conference Paper award (Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics Section) in 2022. She is also the 2023 recipient of the Susan Clarke Young Scholar Award from the APSA Urban Politics Section. Xu received a PhD in Government (Political Science) with distinction from Harvard University in 2023 and a BA in Economics-Political Science and Sustainable Development from Columbia University. She was previously a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy.

Rebecca Del Rossi graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with a concentration in Peace & Justice Studies from Villanova University in 2018 and pursued her passion for social change by earning a Master of Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice in 2023. She started her professional experience in the field of ending gender-based violence as a Prevention Coordinator for a local domestic and sexual violence service agency in Boise, Idaho. Rebecca has since used her passion for the field to grow in various roles such as facilitating federally funded training and technical assistance initiatives for victim service providers and conducting research as a Summer Research Fellow for the SP2 Community Engagement Core Workgroup. She most recently comes to SP2 as a Counselor at the Victim Services Center of Montgomery County, where she provided clinically based trauma and grief counseling to individuals impacted by sexual violence and other crimes.

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