New Interim Dean: Rebecca Utz and the Science of Caring

Today’s students often show up at the University of Utah wanting to solve a problem they see in their community: the housing crisis, the loneliness epidemic, the slow erosion of a grandparent’s memory. They want to have societal impact, and they’ll figure out a degree to declare along the way. It’s a disposition that Rebecca Utz understands intuitively, because it largely describes her own path.

A professor of sociology at the U, Utz was recently named interim dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (CSBS). Its motto, “human solutions to life’s grand challenges,” reads like a description of everything she has spent more than two decades at the U doing. The appointment comes as Utz prepares to receive the American Sociological Association’s Public Impact Scholar Award this August, a recognition that underscores how thoroughly she has woven research, teaching, and real-world consequence into a single calling.

Roundabout Road to the Research Life

Utz grew up in Ohio, but her professional life has been formed entirely in Utah with 22 years at CSBS, from assistant professor to now interim dean. What drew her to this work began at age 14, when the nursing home within walking distance of her childhood home was hiring. She took the job, and that early proximity to aging and care never fully let go.

She went to college as a pre-med major. But the more she learned about aging from a biological or medical perspective, the more inadequate it felt. “It just kept getting more and more focused and myopic,” she says. So she pivoted to healthcare administration, earned a master’s in gerontology and became a licensed nursing home and hospital administrator. The fit still wasn’t quite right. Then came Washington, D.C., a research position with AARP, and a boss who gave her the push she needed: go get your Ph.D., you will need it if you stay in government or research. The crisis that followed was clarifying as she thought, “I have no idea what discipline to go into.” It was sociology that finally organized everything she’d been circling—not just the patient’s experience of aging, but everyone bound to the patient and the organizations that provided care to the aging patients.

The Consumer and the Producer

When Utz taught research methods, she framed the task with a phrase that has become a touchstone. “My job,” she says, “is to create consumers and producers of research, and we have to have research-informed decision making in all the work that we do.”

Consumers, in her framing, evaluate evidence critically and objectively. Producers understand how knowledge is generated. Both matter because, as she puts it, “social scientists  bring data and evidence to try to understand really messy human problems.” She contrasts this with other scientific methods and says that she wants her students to use “objective methods and logic to study human behavior, just as a chemist observes and measures chemical reactions in a controlled beaker.” 

In practice, Utz brought local nonprofits into her classroom and charged students with developing research projects around that organization’s concerns and challenges. Methodologies might include surveys, interviews and observations—or all three—with findings delivered back to the community partner at semester’s end. The questions worth asking, her teaching insisted, often originate outside of the university. Not unlike the problems a young first-year college student might be wanting to solve. And the findings worth having are those that travel back out to the community.

The Crisis No One Calls a Crisis

If there is a defining focus to Utz’s research, it is the hidden labor force of American healthcare: the millions of family caregivers who provide the bulk of care to older adults with dementia, chronic illness and disability. Most of these unsung heroes are spouses, adult children and neighbors—unpaid and invisible to the policy conversations that govern their circumstances.

“Given the persistent and intense stress that caregivers often experience, the caregiver might  die before the person they’re caring for,” she warns. “The caregiver becomes ill, or they become burnt out, and then we have two people we have to take care of.” Families, she argues, provide savings to the healthcare system equivalent to the care delivered in nursing homes. And yet these individuals receive almost no recognition in return. “We have to bring recognition and value to the family, as an essential member of the care team.” 

That conviction shaped her role as a leader in the Family Caregiving Collaborative and her work in convening the Utah Caregiver Roundtable to develop a draft state plan to support family caregivers. This coalition of more than 50 community organizations now collaborate rather than compete for scarce funding in supporting and recognizing the work done by family caregivers. Her commitment also helped drive a five-year National Institute on Aging study that developed “Time for Living and Caring,” a virtual coaching app designed to help caregivers plan and prioritize respite time (time away or a planned break from caregiving). Research for the app directly countered a body of findings suggesting caregivers didn’t benefit from respite. Arguably, the existing research was already being weaponized against funding.

“Policy and advocacy would say, let’s just further cut all the funding for respite programs—even though the waitlist is high, and it’s the thing that people say they need most,” she relates. The app study found the opposite: users took more respite, reported greater satisfaction and felt they were better caregivers for it, after they were coached to better plan and use their limited respite time.

From Hypothesis to Infrastructure

The move to interim dean involves a shift Utz has been preparing for, as she has served the past four years as senior associate dean. “Instead of an individual hypothesis-driven research project that I lead as PI, I started thinking about how I can create innovative, interdisciplinary training programs that bring together research training and societal impact into the curriculum for our students.” As interim dean, that scales further. It might be less time in a research lab, but more infrastructure building; less testing hypotheses, but more building the partnerships that allow the next generation to make an impact and to solve those messy human problems they want to solve.

This transition maps cleanly onto the college’s own mission to produce “knowledge and training that will drive lasting solutions to today’s challenges.” Or more succinctly as a hashtag, #BeTheSolution. Utz has spent 22 years building the habits of mind and external relationships that a solutions-oriented college requires, recognized along the way with teaching, research, and mentoring awards at the college and university levels. The ASA honor this August adds national standing to a career that was always, at its core, about more than an academic publication.

“I have been born and raised in Utah as an academic,” she said. “My career has been here, and it will remain committed to here.” For a college tasked with solving the defining problems of our time, that commitment may be exactly the leadership the moment requires.

By David Pace