School of Social Work Faculty Alumni Award

The Alumni Awards are presented annually to individuals whose personal and professional attainment and service to the college and the community bring honor upon themselves and Rhode Island College. 

Professor Frederic Reamer has been a respected member of the Rhode Island College School of Social Work faculty since 1983. His research and teaching have addressed a wide range of human service issues, including mental health, health care, criminal justice, public welfare, and professional ethics. Dr. Reamer received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has served as a social worker in correctional and mental health settings. He has also taught at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and the University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Reamer has served as Director of the National Juvenile Justice Assessment Center of the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention; senior policy advisor to the Governor of Rhode Island; a member of the State of Rhode Island Parole Board; and a commissioner of the Rhode Island Housing and Mortgage Finance Corporation. Dr. Reamer has conducted extensive research on professional ethics. He has been involved in several national research projects sponsored by the Hastings Center, the Carnegie Corporation, the Haas Foundation, and the Scattergood Program for the Applied Ethics of Behavioral Healthcare at the Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Reamer has published 24 books and more than 160 journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia articles. He has also served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Social Work Education, and associate editor of the National Association of Social Workers Encyclopedia of Social Work.

Professor of Social Work Deborah Siegel Ph.D., LICSW, DCSW, ACSW is a professor in the School of Social Work at Rhode Island College. She came to the college in 1983 after serving as director of field instruction in the B.S.W. program at Auburn University, administrator and faculty member in the School of Social Work at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and the Edith Abbott Teaching and Research Fellow at the University of Chicago, where she earned her master’s and Ph.D. degrees. Dr. Siegel’s research and publications have examined how clinical social workers integrate research, evaluation methods and logic into their practice of psychotherapy; the experiences that children who are adopted have when they grow up with ongoing contact with their birth families; policy and clinical interventions for homelessness; ways to work effectively with struggling teens; and a range of other issues. She teaches inter-professional education for health care providers and students from institutions of higher education across Rhode Island and is developing the integrated behavioral health program at the Rhode Island Free Clinic. Dr. Siegel provides consultation and training for adoption agencies regionally and nationally. Her community organizing and legislative advocacy focus on adoptees’ rights, immigration issues, housing and homelessness, reproductive freedom, public health measures to reduce gun violence, and undoing voter suppression of communities of color.