Robert Hawkins
· Vice DeanVerifiedUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · Social Work
Active 1969–2026
About
Robert Hawkins, Ph.D., began his appointment as vice dean and associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work in July 2024. His research focuses on complex poverty from a policy and socio-behavioral perspective, social capital use and development, race and cultural identity, community participatory research, and social policy analysis. Prior to UNC, he served as the associate dean for academic and faculty affairs and the assistant dean for undergraduate education at the Silver School of Social Work at New York University, where he was on faculty for nearly 20 years and held an endowed chair in poverty studies for 14 years. Hawkins has conducted ethnographic studies in New Orleans, the deep South, and New York City, and developed a community-based participatory research study in a rural municipality in the Philippines. He is part of a multidisciplinary research team utilizing the multiphase optimization strategy (MOST) to develop efficient interventions for low-income individuals and is a co-investigator on a $2.3 million NIH grant applying the MOST framework to vaccine-hesitant African American and Latinx front-line workers. His current research includes a partnership with Nagoya University in Japan to explore how international students can use artificial intelligence to improve mental well-being and an examination of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on low-income workers in the American South. Hawkins has also served as a professor and associate dean at North Carolina State University. He is frequently invited to speak nationally and internationally on issues related to race and social policy, having presented to the United Nations, the U.S. Congress, and other global entities. Hawkins has received numerous awards for his scholarship and teaching, including the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the NIH New Investigator Award, and the Dorothy Height Award for Distinguished Faculty. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the journal Social Work Research and holds degrees from Appalachian State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Brandeis University.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Psychology
- Geography
- Medicine
- Nursing
- Social psychology
- Environmental health
- Gerontology
Selected publications
UNC Libraries · 2026-04-11
articleOpen accessHealth & Social Work · 2026-01-03
articleSenior authorThe Human Element: Artificial Intelligence Will Not Replace Qualitative Researchers
Social Work Research · 2026-04-04
article1st authorCorrespondingSocial Work Research · 2026-01-03
article1st authorCorrespondingAIDS and Behavior · 2025-04-09
articleOpen accessGeneration Space Size: Understanding and Calibrating Open-Endedness of LLM Generations
ArXiv.org · 2025-10-14
preprintOpen accessDifferent open-ended generation tasks require different degrees of output diversity. However, current LLMs are often miscalibrated. They collapse to overly homogeneous outputs for creative tasks and hallucinate diverse but incorrect responses for factual tasks. We argue that these two failure modes are unified by, and can both be addressed by, the notion of effective generation space size (GSS) -- the set of semantically distinct outputs a model considers for a prompt. We present GSSBench, a task suite of prompt pairs with ground-truth GSS relationships to assess different metrics and understand where models diverge from desired behavior. We find that hallucination detection metrics, particularly EigenScore, consistently outperform standard diversity and uncertainty quantification metrics, while using only model internals, providing interpretable insights into a model's internal task representations. We demonstrate three applications of GSS: (1) detecting prompt ambiguity and predicting clarification questions for better grounding, (2) interpreting overthinking and underthinking in reasoning models, and (3) steering models to expand their generation space to yield high-quality and diverse outputs.
Children & Schools · 2025-12-09
articleSenior authorSocial Work Research · 2025-04-30
article1st authorCorrespondingBridging Research and Practice: Publishing Perspectives from NASW Press Editors and Authors
Social Work · 2025-11-15
articleSenior authorSocial Work: The Invisible Web of Hope
Social Work Research · 2025-07-03
article1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 16 shared
Marya Gwadz
New York University
- 16 shared
Leo Wilton
Binghamton University
- 15 shared
Sabrina R. Cluesman
New York State Psychiatric Institute
- 15 shared
Linda M. Collins
New York University
- 15 shared
Noelle R. Leonard
New York University
- 14 shared
Elizabeth Silverman
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
- 13 shared
Robert Freeman
- 12 shared
Caroline Dorsen
Education
- 2002
PhD, Social Policy
Brandeis University
Awards & honors
- University’s Distinguished Teaching Award
- NYU MLK Teaching Award
- the Silver School of Social Work Distinguished Teaching Awar…
- the Dorothy Height Award for Distinguished Faculty
- NIH New Investigator Award
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Robert Hawkins
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup