Katie Merrill
Blog Posts
https://global.luskin.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2017/01/joker-1.png
450
600
Global Luskin
https://global.luskin.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2019/02/Bxd_Blk_LGPA_Luskin_G-e1550679145118-1030x199.png
Global Luskin2017-01-30 13:56:062017-01-30 13:56:06On Oil States and Ethics; on Circuses and Bread! Bring on the Clowns, Bring on the KleptocratsMSW’ 16, International Practice Pathway Fellow
Katie was raised in Santa Cruz, CA. She graduated with honors from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in German. During her undergraduate career, she studied abroad in Göttingen, Germany where she studied Freud in its original. After college, she worked in various settings in California with developmentally disabled adults, individuals with Alzheimer’s and dementia, and with foster youth at a group home. She also spent some months backpacking through Southeast Asia and working on a dude ranch in Colorado. She traveled again to Germany in 2012 to work as PR manager and travel writer for hotel search website trivago. After a year and a half in the corporate world, a return to social work felt inevitable. Kathryn was thrilled to begin the MSW program at UCLA in 2014. For her first-year field internship placement, she worked at a drug and alcohol recovery organization, providing therapy to individuals in treatment and psychoeducation groups to homeless individuals in the Santa Monica community. Kathryn resumes her work in substance abuse treatment through the International Practice Pathway and the Bergman Summer Fellowship—undertaking an internship at the headquarters of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the Staff Welfare Section in Geneva, Switzerland. There, she is running a study on alcohol abuse among staff. Kathryn pursues the GPA certificate in Global Health & Social Services, and is a recipient of the William Randolf Hearst Fellowship for gerontology. She will begin an internship with Kaiser Hospice in the fall.
