David Balk, a professor in Health and Nutrition Sciences, is being honored with the 2019 Academic Educator Award by the Association for Death Education and Counseling. The award, which he will receive at a ceremony in April, recognizes his excellence in teaching and research in the field of thanatology (the scientific study of death and the processes associated with it).

“[Grieving over death] is one of the fundamental experiences of human existence,” says Balk, who is an expert on bereavement among adolescents and college-age students, and helped develop the college’s graduate-level advanced certificate in grief counseling program. He also heads the Brooklyn College graduate program in community health, which has a concentration in thanatology—one of only a handful of such graduate programs in the world.

Balk recently helped to successfully advocate for the college’s student bereavement policy, which grants students one week of excused absences in the wake of the death of a loved one, and may allow them to withdraw for the semester, pending approval from the Division of Student Affairs.

“Twenty-five to thirty percent of all students on a campus are in the first year of grieving the death of family or friend,” says Balk. “It’s true on the Brooklyn College campus, as well as other campuses. We’ve done many studies and they always come back with the same information. It has huge ramifications for their studies. That’s why we put that policy in place.”

Balk, who joined the Brooklyn College faculty in 2004 and has taught at the collegiate level for more than 30 years, says that counseling programs do not prepare people to deal with these issues. “Students getting a mental health counseling degree will come across people who are dealing with loss and they want to know how to work with that.”

He is interested in research on how to help people achieve what he calls a “good death,” one where pain is managed. “Most people don’t die suddenly; they die in a lingering trajectory that could involve excruciating pain,” he says. “There’s a lot of effort being made to help people achieve a good death.”

Balk has worked as a program evaluator and director of research in two community mental health centers. He has also co-edited Handbook of Adolescent Death and Bereavement (Springer Publishing Company, 2004); Handbook of Thanatology: The Essential Body of Knowledge for the Study of Death, Dying, and Bereavement (Routledge, 2013); Adolescent Encounters with Death, Bereavement, and Coping (Springer Publishing Company, 2009); Helping the Bereaved College Student (Springer Publishing Company, 2011); and Dealing with Dying, Death, and Grief During Adolescence (Routledge, 2013).

“Our campus is remarkably diverse,” says Balk. “That’s one of the things that always appealed to me about Brooklyn College. It’s important for us to be open to the various ways people have of acknowledging loss and are coping with loss. Dreamers are facing issues of loss right now. We also have refugees from war-torn areas who have been uprooted from their lives; I know some of them will be coming to Brooklyn. [The campus] is just alive. The many things that are happening around the world somehow end up in Brooklyn.”