Chris Weatherly, PhD, LCSW/MPH (he/him/his)
Curriculum Vitae
weatherly@wustl.edu
Research and Professional Interests
- Climate Change and Rural Mental Health
- Participatory and Community-Based Research
- Severe and Persistent Mental Illness
- Social work education
Research Experience: Chris Weatherly a recent graduate at the Brown School receiving a PhD in Social Work and is a soon-to-be tenure-track faculty member at the University of Georgia School of Social Work. Go Dawgs! #woof
He is a former National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Pre-Doctoral Fellow and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW). His research areas of interest include rural mental health and the intersections of climate change and mental wellbeing.
His dissertation focuses on the mental health of farmers in Southeast Iowa.
Other Research Projects: He is currently assisting the International Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (InCEES) at WashU in developing a Midwest Climate Research Agenda.
He is also actively working to expand the mental health component within the One Health, EcoHealth, and Planetary Health Frameworks, which are approaches that integrate perspectives from the social and natural sciences to document the complex connections between ecosystem, animal, and human health.
Professional history: Chris has 10 years experience as a clinical social worker working with populations with mental illness, substance use issues, and in various stages of psychological distress. He has worked within inpatient psychiatric, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, and emergency department settings. He has his LCSW and is currently in private practice and is a board approved clinical supervisor.
Teaching experience: Chris has extensive experience teaching master’s students of social work in courses centered around the topics of mental health and direct practice. These include a core course on clinical competencies in individual, family, and group environments; as well as teaching a class on differential diagnosis.
He has also worked as a teaching assistant in courses on suicide prevention and treatment, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mental health policy. Additionally, he has guest lectured on the topic of climate change and mental health in multiple courses including Global Public Health and Diversity and Social Justice; as well as for outside service organizations and agencies.
He is passionate about social work education and in effectively training students to work in resource depleted systems where it may be difficult to maintain a sense of hope due to burnout, vicarious trauma, and high case loads.
Additional Information: Chris was born and raised in Tallahassee, Florida. He completed a joint master’s program at the Tulane University Schools of Social Work and Public Health in 2012. He is proud of his service in AmeriCorps and has spent one year as an AmeriCorps VISTA Member helping to manage a volunteer base camp in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana; and another year as an AmeriCorps VISTA Leader supervising volunteers across the state of Alaska.
He is also proud of his work experience in the service industry and for the years in his life where he wasn’t sure what to “be”. He very much enjoys eating, as well as biking, drumming, emphatically talking about birds, wishing he straightened his tie in his professional photo, listening to any/every genre of music, and painting.