George W. Dowdall is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Public Health Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania. He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Saint Joseph’s University.
His research and teaching interests include college drinking, mental health, and research methods. His books include College Drinking: Reframing a Social Problem / Changing the Culture (2013). In addition, he is author or coauthor of articles in journals in social science, medicine, and public health, among them a paper on college rape and intoxicated rape that used the largest representative sample of universities and women thus far. He has received several awards for teaching and research.
A graduate of Regis High School and Holy Cross College, he received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University and was an NIMH postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA School of Public Health. He has been a regular faculty member at Indiana University, Buffalo State, and Saint Joseph’s, and has held visiting appointments at UCLA, Penn, Brown, and Harvard. He was chair of SJU’s Department of Sociology and was associate dean of its College of Arts and Sciences. He was the American Sociological Association’s Congressional Fellow in the office of Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. He was appointed by Governors Rendell and Corbett to serve on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Advisory Council on Drug and Alcohol Abuse from 2004 to 2013. In 2015-16, he served as a consultant to the Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy project (Dennis Culhane and John Fantuzzo, Co-PI’s, University of Pennsylvania). He is a member of the board of the Clery Center for Security on Campus.