SPECIFIC PIONEERING CONTRIBUTIONS
Karen Bullock, PhD, LICSW, is the Louise McMahon Ahearn Endowed Professor in the Boston College School of Social Work and in Global Public Health. She has been a leading force in advancing social work education and training in health disparities, health equity, serious illness care, aging and gerontology, hospice, palliative and end-of-life care decision making for the last two decades. Bullock is the first and only social work practitioner who was honored as the 2024 Richard Payne Outstanding Achievement in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award by the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.
Through Bullock’s trailblazing research and practice focus, she has championed a meaningful role for social workers in the areas of hospice and palliative care - now known as serious illness care. With particular expertise in addressing health disparities and health equity, her pioneering contributions are highly regarded by physicians, nurses, and allied health clinicians on primary care teams. In an area of health that has long been led by physicians, Bullock has made a space for social work and other behavioral health professions to advance interdisciplinary practice for underrepresented patient populations. Notably, she was the first social worker to be selected and served as a Visiting Professor in Palliative Care at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Division of General Medicine/Internal Medicine, in 2019.
Bullock has pursued this work since the beginning of her career because of her longstanding concern about disparities and inequities in health care. She has been a principal investigator and/or coinvestigator for more than $5 million in federal grant funding focused on equity and inclusion for workforce development, aging, and health network sustainability. Specifically, Bullock has been studying why seriously ill Black patients – with incurable conditions like cancer or kidney failure – are less likely to get palliative care, and what it would take to change that.
Bullock’s ability to advance diversity within the social work profession includes serving as the current chair of the NASW National Committee on Racial and Ethnic Diversity (NCORED) since 2019. In 2020 Bullock took the lead to make significant changes to the NASW Code of Ethics to include amended language., which the Delegate Assembly voted to adopt.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
Bullock has had academic appointments at the following: Boston College School of Social Work (Louise McMahon Ahearn Endowed Professor); North Carolina State University, School of Social Work; University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy Affiliate Research Faculty; University of Arkansas, Little Rock, AR Graduate School of Medical Sciences; University of Connecticut, West Hartford, CT; University of North Carolina – Wilmington, NC.
Bullock continues to serve as an editor and consulting editor on several editorial boards: Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, Health & Social Work, International Aging and Human Development, Journal of Aging & Health, Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life & Palliative Care, and Practice Innovations.
BIOGRAPHIC DATA
Bullock grew up in rural North Carolina and graduated from North Carolina State University with her BSW (1990). She received her MSW from Columbia University in New York (1992) and her PhD in sociology and social work from Boston University (2000). Dr. Bullock was the first African American graduate from the Boston University Joint Doctoral Program in Sociology and Social Work.
She has worked with Black and Latinx communities for more than 20 years. In addition to serving older Black and Latinx clients as a psychiatric clinician at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, she has studied health equity and end-of-life decision-making among Black patients since her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1998 and refused hospice care.
Bullock joined the faculty of North Carolina State University in 2011 as an associate professor of social work before being promoted to the rank of full professor and being named head in 2013. She was the first African American to hold these positions in the Department and School of Social Work at North Carolina State. Under Bullock’s leadership, social work experienced significant growth in student credit hours and external funding. Bullock directed the unit’s transition from a department to a school and led a successful re-accreditation process. Since 2022 she has served as the Louise McMahon Ahearn Endowed Professor at the Boston College School of Social Work and Global Health.
SIGNIFICANT ACHEIVEMENTS AND AWARDS
Among Bullock’s many awards: in 2024, she received the Richard Payne Outstanding Achievement in Diversity, Equity Award, and Inclusion by the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine; the 2021 Gerontology Society of America (GSA) Fellow Award (FGSA); the 2021 New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) Fellow Award; the 2012 Best Article Award, Routledge Journals, article published Journal of Social Work in End of-Life & Palliative Care; and in 2003-2005, the Social Work Leadership Institute Award/ SOROS Foundation.
SIGNIFICANT PUBLICATIONS
One of Bullock’s most popular studies, which won the Best Article Award from Routledge Journals in 2012, revealed that older Black patients routinely refuse to go to their local hospital for care in the time leading up to their death. Their resistance, she found, was often rooted in their memories of the past, when hospitals were segregated and they were denied decent healthcare.
An important, recently published study in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management in June 2022, looks at how the race and ethnicity of research participants are reported in the literature on palliative care. Bullock and her co-authors discovered that most of the research participants for these studies are white and that people of color are often described using labels that are either demeaning or unclear, such as non-white and Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC).
Bullock, K. (2024). Unprecedented challenges: Cancer care amid pandemics, disasters and other traumatic events. In Hedlund, S., Miller, B., Christ, G., & Messner, C. (Eds.), Handbook of oncology and palliative social work: Psychosocial care for people coping with cancer. (pp. 57-68). New York, NY: Oxford University Press
Rhodes, R. L., Barrett, N.J., Bullock, K., & Johnson, K. S. (2023). Response to Anandarajah G et al., Trust as a Central Factor in Hospice Enrollment Disparities Among Ethnic and Racial Minority Patients: A Qualitative Study of Interrelated and Compounding Factors Impacting Trust (DOI: 10.1089/jpm.2023.0090)." Journal of Palliative Medicine, 26(10), pp. 1315 1316.
Bullock, K., & Bullock-Johnson, R. (2023). Cultural humility: Necessary but insufficient for equitable access to care. In Doka, K.J., Jennings, B., Kirk, T.W., & Tucci, A.S. (Eds.), End-of-Life Ethics in a Changing World (pp. 73-85). Washington, DC: Hospice Foundation of America Press.
Wallace, C.L., Coccia, K., Khoo, Y.M., & Bullock. K. (2023). Meaning of Hospice Care: Perceptions of Patients and Families. American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.