Lin Fang and Micheal Shier promoted to the rank of Full Professor

The Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work is pleased to announce that faculty members Lin Fang and Michael L. Shier have been promoted to the rank of Full Professor, effective July 1, 2024. 

“Professors Lin Fang and Michael Shier are two excellent, impactful scholars deeply deserving of this recognition,” says Charmaine Williams, Dean and Professor of FIFSW. “I invite our community to congratulate them both on this achievement in recognition of their outstanding teaching, research and commitment to the University.” 

Professor Lin Fang 

Lin Fang is the Founder and Director of FIFSW’s Talk It Out Counselling Clinic and the Factor-Inwentash Chair in Children’s Mental Health. In addition to 10-plus years of postgraduate clinical experience, Professor Fang has published and presented widely on topics such as adolescent substance use, information and communication technologies, and mental health and cross-cultural experiences among immigrant communities.  

In recent years, Professor Fang has concentrated her scholarship on community-based research, examining how neighborhood and structural factors shape lived experiences of young people, and how young people, in turn, engage and understand the world in which they live. Her research uses community-based participatory and arts-based methods. Some of her projects include “This is My Regent Park”: Perspectives from Young People, a SSHRC-funded project that sought to understand how young people define and relate to their neighbourhood of Regent Park as it undergoes a major redevelopment; and My Script My Voice, a university-community collaboration to empower Asian youth and families in the face of anti-Asian racism. She is currently the Principal Investigator for Project APPA (Asian Parents Participatory Action), a 3-year, SSHRC-funded research project that utilizes participatory action research to work with Asian parents and other stakeholders to promote capacity building, build knowledge and resources, and curate an Asian-centred approach against anti-Asian racism. 

During the pandemic, Professor Fang conceived and launched the Talk It Out Counseling Clinic, where supervised Master of Social Work (MSW) students at FIFSW provide free short-term counseling services to communities that face multiples challenges, including Black and other racialized communities. In its first 2.5 years, the Clinic trained 39 MSW students to provide services to over 450 clients and residents in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Today, as we transition through the pandemic, Talk It Out continues to serve and innovate, striving to be a mental health hub that enables trained social work students to work with communities that need them the most. 

Professor Fang teaches in the Health and Mental Health Field of Study in the MSW program and research methods in the PhD Program and was the recipient of the 2015-2016 Teaching Award at FIFSW. 

Professor Micheal L. Shier 

Micheal Shier is the Director of FIFSW’s Master of Social Work program and the Field of Study Coordinator for the program’s the Human Services Management and Leadership field of study. He is also the coordinator for the Certificate program in Human Services Management and Leadership with the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. He has been the recipient of several research awards, including the Government of Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation Early Researcher Award (2017-2022). Professor Shier is also the Canada Research Chair in Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship in the Human Services. 

Professor Shier’s program of research aims to optimize social service delivery and improve social outcomes for vulnerable groups.  His work enhances the capacity of nonprofit leadership within our community and supports local social welfare and community economic development. His research focuses on: 

• organizational development in human service organizations to support outcomes and strategies that lead to social innovation and social entrepreneurship (including the development of leadership capacity, organizational, culture, positive partnerships dynamics, and for-profit market-based activities) 

• equity and inclusion 

• workplace health and safety, and  

• trauma informed organizational environments.  

Professor Shier’s current funded research seeks to develop socially innovative organizational strategies within the nonprofit and voluntary sector to promote equitable and inclusive human service organizational environments. Its objective is also to understand the mechanisms that promote social-purpose driven for-profit activities within and among non-profit and for-profit organizations across Canada. Professor Shier works extensively with nonprofit human service organizations to develop and implement models of evaluation that support the identification and implementation of social innovation efforts.