Elizabeth S Palley

Elizabeth Palley, JD, MSW, PhD is a Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program at the Adelphi University School of Social Work where she teaches social policy to BSW, MSW, and PhD students. She received her JD and MSW from the University of Mayland School of Social Work. She began her career working as a lawyer advocating on behalf of children with special education needs and families with lead poisoned children. Following her experience as a lawyer, she returned to school to pursue a PhD from the Heller School at Brandeis University. Her research since that time has focused primarily on policy implementation and the challenges that implementers, often social workers, face as well as the unintended consequences of social policy on those it is designed to help. She has written extensively about special education, child care policy, and pregnancy discrimination in both peer reviewed journals and Op-Eds and is an editor of the Journal of Policy Practice and Research. In 2009, she had a Fulbright to South Korea where she taught at Yonsei University in their Social Welfare doctoral program. In 2014, she wrote In Our Hands: the Struggle for US Child Care Policy (NYU Press) with co-author, Corey Shdaimah.