Brief Bio

Amy Hillier, MSW, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Policy & Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. She currently teaches introductory research methods and social welfare history courses for Social Policy & Practice and Penn’s undergraduate Urban Studies program. She is the co-director of The Penn Experience, an online course about racism and other forms of oppression for graduate professional students.

Her doctoral and post-doctoral research focused on historical mortgage redlining. For more than a decade, her research focused on links between the built environment and public health. During that time, her primary faculty position was with the Department of City & Regional Planning in the Weitzman School of Design. She moved to Social Policy & Practice in 2017 in order to pursue new research interests relating to LGBTQ communities, particularly trans youth. She is the founding director of the LGBTQ Certificate.