Graham Pruss (he/him)

Graham J. Pruss received his PhD from the University of Washington Department of Anthropology in 2019. He joined the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California San Francisco’s Center for Vulnerable Populations as a Postdoctoral Scholar in 2020.

Dr. Pruss’ research focuses on vehicle residency, social services and policy development. Graham brings diverse perspectives to anthropological and ethnoarchaeological research in these topics, as a former outreach specialist for social services (2013-2015) and previous recipient of social welfare programs when a homeless youth (1992) and teen parent (1994). He received the UW Wienker Award for outstanding honors thesis in anthropology (2012), which supported the development of the Vehicular Residency Research Program (VRRP) at Seattle University from 2012 to 2013. The VRRP field researchers mapped anonymous vehicle residence settlement patterns by developing a "vehicle residence identification schema," later adopted for the annual official King County Point-in-Time counts of "unsheltered" people. Pruss presented on the state of vehicle residency to Seattle City Council in 2012, and in 2015 joined All Home - the (US HUD mandated) Seattle/King County Continuum of Care coordinating agency - where he served on the Executive Board, Governing Board and as co-Chair of the Policy Committee. Graham has worked as a Liaison for the Unhoused Community with the City of Seattle, served on the Mayor of Seattle's Innovation Advisory Council, and led the documentation of regional vehicle residency for the annual point-in-time count of homeless and unhoused people from 2017 to 2020. He has published in the journal for the Office of Policy Development and Research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Cityscapes (2020).