Laura Nissen

Former Dean and Professor Laura Burney Nissen is from the Portland State University School of Social Work. With a commitment to innovative and equity-centered systems change, Laura has worked with futures practice and lenses throughout her career in a variety of transdisciplinary settings.  She is in the a foresight practitioner and a Research Fellow with the Institute for the Future and has served as a Presidential Futures Fellow at PSU 2019-2022.  She has been PI on a two-year grant to convene first of its kind national Social Work Health Futures Lab from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.   She has a new book with Oxford University Press entitled “Anticipatory Social Work: Foresight Approaches and Tools for Social Imagining and Collective Praxis” which is just out now.    Her commitment is to challenge social work and social workers to think beyond the traps of “short-termism” and participate in co-creating the world we want.    She lives in the Columbia River Gorge in Washington.   For additional information about her work, please visit:  www.socialworkfutures.com.