Campus News

UGA School of Social Work’s Bride named spring 2011 Distinguished Scholar

Athens, Ga. – University of Georgia associate professor Brian Bride, the interim director of the Ph.D. program in the School of Social Work, has been named “Spring 2011 Distinguished Scholar.”

Bride, a widely recognized expert on secondary traumatic stress, received the award during a recent colloquium at the Buffalo Center for Social Research at the State University of New York-Buffalo, where he delivered a lecture titled “Collateral Damage: The Impact of Caring for Persons Who Have Experienced Trauma.” The bi-annual colloquium is an outlet for recognized scholars to present research findings.

“It’s certainly a great honor to receive this award,” Bride said. “It was a privilege to share with my colleagues what we think and what we know about secondary traumatic stress, both in professionals and clinicians such as social workers and nurses, as well as secondary traumatic stress among family members such as military spouses,” he said.

Bride also addressed the current research and recommendations for the prevention and reduction of secondary traumatic stress. Secondary traumatic stress is the negative impact of traumatic events on those who care for traumatized people.

Bride has published and presented extensively on secondary traumatic stress and recently was named editor of Traumatology: An International Journal. Bride also developed the Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale, a widely used instrument for measuring secondary traumatic stress.He has published three books and more than 40 journal articles in the areas of mental health, substance abuse and HIV/AIDS, and has more than 20 years of clinical and consulting experience in mental health and substance abuse treatment services.

For more information about Bride’s work and the UGA School of Social Work, see http://ssw.uga.edu:8091/plone.