CAMPUS BRIEF: Wednesday, April 22, 1998

School of Social Work gets $2.3 million grant Over a five-year period, the center will conduct research on adults with severe mental illnesses. The Medical School's Psychiatry Department and the Graduate School of Education will team up with Social Work for the study. Researchers for the center, including scholars, statisticians and methodologists, will concentrate on three core areas: legal issues affecting the mentally ill, including their treatment by the criminal justice system; managed health care services for the mentally ill; and the effectiveness of different housing options for the mentally ill homeless. Social Work Professor Phyllis Solomon, who will be heading the project, said the program should result in "more substantive knowledge" of the mentally ill for the researchers. In addition, there may be an extra financial benefit, according to Solomon, who has been at Penn for four years. "We hope to generate additional grants," she said, adding that the project's success would attract more external research dollars to the school. -- Edward Sherwin