The Study of Caring

Welcoming Ben Capistrant

While doing field research in Malawi in 2006, Benjamin Capistrant experienced a turning point that would set a trajectory for his areas of specialty.

Capistrant, who joined the SSW faculty in July as an assistant professor, was studying people caring for aging parents with undiagnosed dementia. At the same time, his own family was caring for elders with dementia.

“The universality of this idea that families care for each other hit me,” he said. What he refers to as his aha moment sparked an ongoing fascination with this research question: “How do families care for each other, and what does caregiving look like when families look different and have different resources?”

The search for answers has led him to study families in India, where family structures look different than in the United States, as well as gay male couples in which one partner has prostate cancer.

Capistrant is in the unusual position of holding an appointment at SSW while teaching half time in the statistics and data science department at Smith College, where his husband, Miles Ott, is an assistant professor.

Capistrant, 37, earned his master’s and doctorate in public health at Harvard University and his bachelor’s degree at Boston University. In the data science department at Smith, Capistrant last year taught intro and intermediate statistics and population health courses. The exact courses he will teach at SSW have yet to be determined, but he is already working with students earning Ph.D.s and serving on committees.

“He is a great collaborator and we anticipate a wonderful colleague and contributor for the SSW,” Dean Marianne Yoshioka said in her letter announcing his appointment.

“My background and interest as a methodologist lends itself to some natural collaboration,” he said. “Those are pieces I’m already starting to develop and cultivate, research questions with other faculty here.”

While new to social work, Capistrant sees an enormous amount of intersection between the social justice aspect of social work and public health, particularly the social determinants of health.

“Social work as a discipline has done a really nice job of crafting an identity and having an organized set of principles,” he said. “I think that’s exciting to join the ranks and be a part of.”—Laurie Loisel