Brown’s Office of Community Engagement and Swearer Center for Public Service are delighted to recognize Lauren Yapp and Tommy Chou as the 2025 recipients of the Howard R. Swearer Engaged Faculty Awards. While one of the awards each year is designated for an early career faculty member, the committee this year decided to recognize two early career faculty members who have centered community partnerships in their scholarly work and had deep impact on the community collaborators and students writing in support of their nominations.
Lauren Yapp, Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Urban Studies Program
Dr. Lauren Yapp considers community engagement “a central tenet of my teaching,” and both students and community partners attest to the powerful impact of her approach. Through intentional collaboration with organizations in both Providence and Jakarta, she has fostered meaningful relationships and opportunities for students to learn from - and contribute to - the organizations’ efforts to make cities more just and sustainable. An inspiring course instructor and mentor to many students pursuing engaged research projects, Yapp has contributed to making the Urban Studies program “an academic home for a growing number of Brown students,” while also expanding partnerships on campus; key collaborators from Indonesia will soon present, for instance, at a symposium on “Narrating Change: Stories from Urban Southeast Asia.”
Yapp’s longstanding Community-Based Learning and Research (CBLR) course “URBN 1871A Heritage in the Metropolis: Remembering and Preserving the Urban Past” partnered most recently with the Providence Preservation Society (PPS) to revise the histories of seven historic properties in PPS's "Guide to Providence Architecture" to include the experiences of previously overlooked residents such as Black ministers, Narragansett veterans, female educators, Jewish community leaders, and anti-war activists. Students rooted their research in “genealogical records, archives, old newspaper databases and other historical resources,” writes Marisa Angell Brown, Executive Director of PPS, and contributed to a fuller history of College Hill than common perceptions of “a white Anglo-Saxon enclave for Providence’s elite.” One of the students in the course, Ronnie Shashoua ‘25, suggests that seeking “to understand not just who built and owned the house, but who lived there, who worked or visited there, and how these people were connected to the broader histories of labor, race, and gender in Providence” enabled students to learn about “the city we call home today” – and the impact of “gentrification, urban renewal, and Brown University itself.”
Yapp’s newer CBLR and GELT Winter session course, “URBN 1871G: The Right to the City – Focus on Indonesia,” engaged students with resident leaders in three traditional kampung neighborhoods in Jakarta as well as local university students and organizers at the Rujak Center for Urban Studies. According to Rujak’s Program Director Dian Tri Irawaty, “the students successfully produced a documentary that highlighted kampung life and collective resistance, a resource that will be used by the kampung cooperatives in their campaigns. The success of this visit was due in large part to Dr. Yapp’s meticulous preparation, which included working a full year in advance and thoughtfully considering our input.” All twelve students in the course shared their appreciation in a letter that noted many strengths including “generosity and care” with students and partners, “long-lasting, continual connections based on reciprocity” and a combination of “deep mentorship and 1:1 relationships with complex scholarly engagement with subject material, community partners, and physical spaces.”
Her courses engaged with both Providence and Jakarta communities have inspired students to advocate on issues in their own communities and to pursue community-engaged research projects, including a couple with some of the same partners in Indonesia. Yapp aims “to continue to contribute to the critical work” of community engagement in Providence, “while also adding a global perspective to our ongoing campus conversations around housing justice, participatory planning, and community organizing.” The mutuality of benefit is clear too; her respectful relationships with community partners has resulted in the co-generation of knowledge and tangible materials that community members will use for both public education and policy advocacy.
Po-hun "Tommy" Chou, Assistant Professor (Research), Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Department of Family Medicine
Dr. Tommy Chou brings an ethic of collaboration and care to his scholarly work, which spans clinical, educational, research and advocacy activities focused on advancing physical and mental health. His partnerships with the Family Care Center in Pawtucket and social workers in the Pawtucket School District reflect his appreciation for how those collaborators “have shown up for their local residents in ways that I strive to match using our university platform.” They in turn appreciate his presence and contributions to enhancing the capacity of medical providers and school professionals to support community members while centering their perspectives and experiences. Chou has also sought to support ethical community-engaged science more broadly through publications and review structures.
Dr. Chou’s work in Pawtucket began with the Family Care Center (FCC), a primary care clinic that could both inform and benefit from his research “to revise an online behavioral obesity treatment aligned with the lived experience of those with low income.” By seeing patients without drawing salary, he expands access to care and generates revenue for the clinic. By collecting and analyzing data with patients and providers, he will inform ongoing efforts to improve the clinic’s programs, procedures and outcomes. According to Dr. Stephanie Czech, the Director of Behavioral Health for the Department of Family Medicine and Director of Integrated Behavioral Health for Care New England Medical Group and the FCC, Chou has supported collaborative treatment planning and “most notably … advanced our community health workers’ capacity to navigate the school system and advocate” because of the insights he has gained through his engagement beyond the clinic.
Through involvement with the Health Equity Zone in Pawtucket, Chou connected with Shara Plynton, a leader among local school social workers, who praises the spirit he brings to their work together: “I have never encountered someone with his unique combination of qualities. These include a deep presence and empathic listening, an understanding of the devastating realities of the needs that are present in urban education, a sense of humor, a realness/humility that defies the status of his academic position, and a willingness to roll up his sleeves to help with any aspect of the work.” After garnering support from district administrators, Chou worked with Plynton to develop workshops that not only sought to translate research to practice, but also to foster collective strategizing, evaluation, communication skills and agency. According to Plynton and others, his approach has resonated, fostering professional growth and community and ultimately benefiting students and families.
Concerned about school social workers’ high caseloads, Chou has also coordinated with RI Kids Count on advocacy efforts and worked with colleagues to document health impacts in ways that can inform policy. He has published several peer-reviewed articles on ethical issues in engaged research and co-authored articles with community-based collaborators. In order to make community-engaged science more visible and feasible for others, he is working with colleagues to understand how IRB processes and infrastructure in BIRCH (and at Brown) can effectively support community collaborators. Those activities all stem from Chou’s own community partnerships grounded in deep respect and responsiveness. “While [recent] events have unequivocally damaged stability, safety, and trust within and between our institutions and communities,” he writes, “I am reminded of Mr. Rogers’ well-known quote: ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”