Lily Casura is a longtime independent journalist and the founder of the award-winning Healing Combat Trauma, the first website to address the issue of combat veterans and PTSD (established February, 2006). She is also a chapter author in Healing War Trauma: A Handbook of Creative Approaches, Raymond Monsour Scurfield and Col. Kathy Platoni (U.S. Army), editors, published by Routledge Psychosocial Stress Series. (November, 2012) and the author of Gentle Medicine: Treating Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia Successfully with Natural Medicine. (Self Health Press, 2000.)
In 2017, she was awarded “Most Outstanding Graduate Student” at her university’s four-program college. In 2016, she received the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) — Texas “Outstanding Student of the Year.” And in 2015, she was awarded an inaugural Howard G. Buffett grant for women journalists by the International Women’s Media Foundation to pursue a multimedia reporting project about homeless women veterans.
Since 2015 she has been conducting independent, Institutional Review Board -approved research as the principal investigator into female veteran homelessness, both a pilot study and a follow-up study. She has also created an award-winning series of data visualizations about population characteristics in a major American city. She has presented on both these topics at a wide range of conferences, panels, board meetings and workshops, from those focusing on academic research to advocacy to general information for the public to use in decision-making. She is a member of the American Public Health Association (APHA), the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS), the Alamo Regional Data Alliance (ARDA), the P16Plus Data Council and several others.
Lily Casura, MSW 