By Katherine Mangan

When Richard Barth talks about the need to improve the nation's child-welfare services, he speaks from experience, not only as one of the nation's most prolific scholars on the subject, but also as an adoptive parent of two children who had been in foster care.

Mr. Barth, dean and a professor of social work at the University of Maryland at Baltimore, was singled out this year for a distinguished-achievement award from the Society for Social Work and Research.

The award recognized decades of contributions to the field, including expert testimony that has helped strengthen the nation's child-welfare laws. He is the author or co-author of 180 peer-reviewed research papers and 13 books.

Before becoming dean at Baltimore in 2006, Mr. Barth, 58, taught social work for eight years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and 16 years at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned his master's and Ph.D.

He traces his interest in social work back to his childhood on Long Island. His father was a family physician and his mother an occupational therapist. "I came to realize from listening to my father, who would take a lot of calls at home, that many of the issues his patients were dealing with related to problems in living as much as problems in health," he says. His first experience working with young children and their parents came in high school, when he assisted his mother in a program similar to what later became Head Start.

After studying two years at Brown University, he took time off from college and moved to Chicago to work with children with autism while taking psychology courses at the University of Chicago. His job involved helping families learn simple sign language to interact with children who had trouble verbalizing. "Many of them had lived their entire young lives without being able to tell their parents what they needed, and suddenly they were communicating," he recalls.

Much of his career has been dedicated to helping improve support services for parents who take in abused and neglected kids.

In 1986, he and his wife, a fellow social worker, adopted a 3-year-old boy and his 2-year-old half-sister from foster care. "James, in particular, had had very rough treatment," Mr. Barth says. "He had been found toddling in the streets, rummaging for food, and had very little language." His little sister was depressed and withdrawn.

Over the years, Mr. Barth learned firsthand what it was like to turn to services for issues like learning difficulties, running away, and substance abuse. "Being a client as well as a professor is both humbling and identifies areas where you realize there are major gaps," he says.

Mr. Barth's research documenting high rates of homelessness among former foster children has influenced legislation that extends financial support for children who are not ready to leave home at age 18.

When he started doing research on the topic, he said, "not much attention had been given to what it's like at 18 to be given a black plastic bag with your belongings and told, 'Here's a few bucks. Go to a shelter, but you can't live here anymore.'"

His research also helped persuade Congress in 1994 to pass the Multiethnic Placement Act, which removed barriers to placing children with parents of another race. His research, which involved nearly 4,000 children in California, demonstrated that when white and black children came into foster care at the same time, the white children were four times as likely to have been adopted within six years.

Fewer children are growing up in foster care today, he says. Between 1980 and 2010, the number of domestic adoptions in the United States soared from about 10,000 to 50,000 a year. But over those years, training and support for adoptive parents hasn't changed enough, he says. "One of my goals is to continue to hammer away at that."

Colleagues say Mr. Barth has brought scientific rigor and a passionate commitment to the field.

Jeanne C. Marsh, dean of the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, serves with Mr. Barth on the board of the recently created American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, which he chairs. "He's very energetic, smart, and generous with his time and his ideas," Ms. Marsh says. "In so many ways, I've watched him nurture and develop young researchers in our field."

While the cases they study are often heartbreaking or frustrating, "when you see kids who stop being afraid and are able to concentrate and laugh and play, it's incredibly rewarding," Mr. Barth says.