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Dr. Heike Boeltzig-Brown
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Heike Boeltzig-Brown is a Senior Research Associate and Academic Program Developer at the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI), School for Global Inclusion and Social Development and adjunct faculty in the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB). Her key research interests focus on disability, employment and vocational rehabilitation (VR), as well as information and communication technology. At the ICI, Dr. Boeltzig-Brown has beendirecting research projects related to VR and funded by the federal government. This has included: a systematic review and synthesis of research on the public VR program spanning 1970–2008; a national survey of state VR agencies; and case study research on effective state VR agency practices to better serve persons with most significant disabilities. Dr. Boeltzig-Brown has collaborated on projects with City University London in the UK, and Griffith University and Bond University in Australia. As a researcher at the Center for Comparative Research in Social Welfare at the University of Stirling in the UK, she served as the lead researcher on German disability and employment policy in a 13-country comparative research study funded by the European Union. In 2008–2009, Dr. Boeltzig-Brown and her British colleagues won a grant from the IBM Center for the Business of Government to conduct a systematic review and synthesis of research on ways that public employment service systems in the US and the UK can better serve customers with disabilities. She has also conducted research into strategies in the US and the UK to encourage traditionally underserved groups of people to access online government services. Since May 2012, Dr. Boeltzig-Brown has been working for the ICI remotely from Tokyo, Japan. She has collaborated with her Japanese colleagues from the National Institute of Vocational Rehabilitation (NIVR) on a number of research papers and presentations focusing on public VR service delivery in the US and Japan. As a Program Developer, she co-authored with Dr. William E. Kiernan, ICI Executive Director, the proposal that established a new School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at UMB in 2012 including a Master’s and a Doctoral Program in these areas within the new School. She holds a doctorate in public policy from UMB and a master’s degree in applied social research from the University of Stirling, Scotland.