CRISP is proud to announce that Dr. Angelique Day, our Legislative Director, has accepted an appointment at Oxford University’s Rees Center as Senior Academic Research Leader in Children’s Social Care. This is a significant professional achievement for Dr. Day, but it is also an important moment for social work. Her appointment demonstrates what becomes possible when rigorous research, lived experience, public service, and legislative advocacy come together with purpose.
The Rees Center is internationally recognized for producing research that helps practitioners, policymakers, and researchers improve children’s social care and education. Dr. Day’s new role will focus on shaping and driving a major research agenda in children’s social care, with attention to stability, educational outcomes, well-being, and the experiences of children in care and adoption. The position calls for intellectual leadership, research development, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the translation of evidence into policy and practice.
Her Native American ancestry, lived experience as a foster care child, and outstanding track record as a researcher, legislative advocate, and academic leader make her a perfect fit for this demanding opportunity.
She is a Professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work, an Adjunct Professor in the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, and an affiliated scholar with UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools. Before joining the University of Washington, she served on the faculty at Wayne State University, where she founded and directed the Transition to Independence Program, which supported foster youth in higher education. Her academic preparation includes a PhD in Interdisciplinary Health Sciences, an MSW with a specialization in organizational and community practice, a certificate in child advocacy, and an undergraduate degree in sociology and psychology completed summa cum laude.
But credentials alone do not explain her influence. Dr. Day’s career has been shaped by her ability to move across research, policy, systems reform, and practice. She has worked as a child protective services worker, a policy and outreach associate, a program coordinator, a researcher, a faculty member, and a legislative advocate. Her work has focused on some of the most consequential issues in child welfare: kinship care, youth aging out of foster care, Indian child welfare, foster and adoptive parent preparation, trauma-informed education, higher education access, and culturally responsive child welfare practice.
At CRISP, we often argue that advocacy alone is not enough. Advocacy must be connected to research, civic engagement, policy analysis, legislative strategy, and the disciplined work of getting evidence into the hands of decision-makers. Dr. Day’s career is a model of that approach. Her CV reflects more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, including recent work on the Indian Child Welfare Act, kinship navigator programs, youth engagement in permanency planning, foster/adoptive caregiver readiness, trauma-informed education, and the behavioral health needs of youth with foster care experience.
Dr. Day has built a reputation for integrating lived experience into research question development, measurement, data interpretation, and recommendations to the field. She does not study systems from a distance. She works to reshape how evidence is produced and used, particularly for young people, families, tribal communities, and caregivers, who are too often marginalized by conventional policy processes.
Her work also shows what research-to-policy translation looks like in practice. One body of her research helped inform the Trauma Informed Children and Families Act, which was incorporated into opioid legislation signed into law in 2018 and supported workforce training and trauma-informed interventions across child welfare, juvenile justice, education, and mental health. Another body of work has supported legislative efforts to expand campus support programs for foster and homeless students, with related ideas enacted at the state level.
That is policy impact. Not every idea becomes federal law. Sometimes the win is a state statute. Sometimes it is new administrative guidance. Sometimes it is a shift in the questions policymakers are prepared to ask. But none of that happens automatically. Research does not become policy simply because it is published. Someone must translate it. Someone must understand timing, language, jurisdiction, feasibility, and implementation.
Her recent federal service further deepened that perspective. During a yearlong sabbatical, through an Intergovernmental Personnel Act assignment, she served as a Senior Policy Advisor with the Administration for Children and Families and the NIH Tribal Health Research Office. Her work included developing policies related to alternative mental health treatments for children and youth in foster care, strengthening coordination between ACF and NIH, and advancing culturally responsive evaluation connected to Indian child welfare and tribal communities.
This matters because social workers and social work scholars need to be inside the rooms where policy is developed, interpreted, and implemented. Dr. Day has said that her sabbatical appointments reinforced the value of having PhD-trained experts inside Congress and the administrative branch, where their presence can influence the conversations taking place. As CRISP’s Legislative Director, Dr. Day has helped create a structured pathway for researchers to bring their work to members of Congress. She has strengthened the connection between child welfare expertise and legislative engagement, including by helping connect the Congressional Social Work Caucus with the Foster Youth Caucus. That kind of bridge-building is central to CRISP’s mission.
Dr. Day’s appointment at Oxford is not a departure from her career path. It is a continuation of it on a larger international platform. She brings to the Rees Center deep child welfare expertise, a substantial research portfolio, lived-experience-informed scholarship, federal policy experience, and a demonstrated commitment to translating evidence into action.
CRISP congratulates Dr. Angelique Day on this extraordinary appointment. We are proud of her leadership and confident that her work at Oxford will strengthen the global conversation about children’s social care, foster youth, kinship families, tribal communities, and the role of evidence in shaping better systems.
Her career reminds us that strategic advocacy is not simply about speaking up. It is about doing the work, building the evidence, entering the policy space, and being ready when opportunity arrives. That is Beyond Advocacy. And Dr. Angelique Day is helping lead the way.