Catherine M. Vu, MPA, MSW, PhD
Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow
Curriculum Vitae
MPA, MSW, PhD
catherine.vu@nyu.edu | (212) 998-5929
bio
Catherine M. Vu received her BS in economics/management science from the University of California, San Diego. She holds a Master of Public Administration from Cornell University and an MSW and PhD from the School of Social Welfare at University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in the relationship between human service agencies and their organizational capacity to serve low-income minority groups. Her dissertation explores the contextual and organizational factors associated with service utilization by people of color. As an assistant professor/faculty fellow for the McSilver Institute for Poverty and Policy Research at the Silver School of Social Work, she hopes to build on this research by collecting data and designing studies that explore 1) the strategies used by ethnic agencies to engage minority clients, and 2) how ethnic agencies can provide positive individual and community outcomes for the populations they serve. She has research and practice experiences with a number of different ethnic agencies providing a wide range of human services for low-income populations including housing, mental health, and child care. She is a recipient of the Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and has presented her scholarly work at national conferences, including the Urban Affairs Association and the Council on Social Work Education.
