Riana E. Anderson, Ph.D. – University of Michigan

Riana Elyse Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. She received her PhD in Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of Virginia and completed a Clinical and Community Psychology Doctoral Internship at Yale University’s School of Medicine. Anderson uses mixed methods in clinical interventions to study racial discrimination and socialization in Black families to reduce racial stress and trauma and improve psychological well-being and family functioning. She investigates how protective familial mechanisms such as parenting and racial socialization operate in the face of risks linked to poverty, discrimination, and residential environment. Dr. Anderson is particularly interested in how these factors predict familial functioning and subsequent child psychosocial outcomes, especially when enrolled in family-based interventions. She has recently developed a five-session intervention entitled EMBRace (Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race) to alleviate racial stress and trauma in parents and adolescents in order to facilitate healthy parent-child relationships, parent and adolescent psychological well-being, and healthy coping strategies.

Diamond Bravo, Ph.D. – Harvard University

Diamond Bravo received her doctorate from the Program in Family and Human Development at Arizona State University. She received her B.A. in psychology from University of California, Riverside and her M.A. in general experimental psychology from California State University, Northridge. Bravo’s research focuses on the cultural mechanisms and constructs that contribute to the academic success and well-being of immigrant students and students of color in the United States. (Much of the research in this area focuses more intently on how cultural constructs, such as stereotype threat, undermine academic achievement and life outcomes). For example, in a recent paper, Bravo studied a group of low-income, Mexican-origin adolescent mothers in order to determine the extent to which valuing one’s family and learning about one’s own ethnic identity and heritage would predict higher educational expectations.

Yi-Ping Hsieh, Ph.D. – University of North Dakota

Yi-Ping Hsieh is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of North Dakota. She received her doctorate in Educational Psychology and Human Development from Indianan University. She received her B.S. in Medical Sociology and Social Work from Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan. She also received an M.A. in TESOL from Long Island University and a M.A. in Counseling from Indiana University. Hsieh’s areas of interests include mental health and behavioral problems of children and youth, culture value and practice, internet addiction, and cyberbullying amongst others.

Patrece Joseph, M.A. – Tufts University

Patrece Joseph is a current doctoral student in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Bates College and her Master’s degree, with a focus in Child and Family Policy and Programs, from Tufts University. Her dedication to serving communities propels her research, which uses community-based methods to reduce health inequities by understanding the role of media and neighborhoods as contexts for health promotion in low-income and/or Black and Latinx adolescents’ health. She applies this research to the development and evaluation of prevention programs that empower adolescents by leveraging their media and health literacy skills. Patrece currently serves as the coordinator of the Child Health Equity Research Lab led by Dr. Sasha Fleary.

Henry Willis, Ph.D. Candidate – University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

Henry Willis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Clinical Psychology program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is originally from Jackson, Mississippi, and he received his B.S. in psychology from Howard University and his M.A. in clinical psychology from Columbia University. As an undergraduate, Henry examined how social networking use affected the self-esteem of African American college students. For his master’s degree, Henry explored how culture and racial identity might shape the presentation of obsessive-compulsive disorder in African Americans and how current treatments could be adapted to be sensitive to race and culture. His current interests include exploring the relationship between online and offline racial discrimination and mental health outcomes, understanding sociocultural protective factors (i.e., racial identity) and how they impact psychopathology (i.e., obsessive-compulsive disorder) within African Americans, creating cultural adaptations of evidence-based treatments, and utilizing mobile-health technology to increase access to mental health treatments for underserved populations. In 2016, Henry was awarded the Health Policy Research Scholars grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and plans to use his clinical psychology training to influence health policy and build a culture of health. In 2018, Henry was awarded the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and will use the training from this fellowship to enhance diversity in teaching and research at the university level.

Carlisa Simon, M.A. – University of California Los Angeles

Carlisa is a doctoral student in the Education department where she studies the psychosocial development racial-ethnic socialization of adolescents of color in and outside of schools. She earned her B.A. in Psychology at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA and most recently, her M.A. in Education at UCLA.

Vaness Cox, Doctoral Candidate – University of Michigan

Vaness Cox is a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she attended the University of Missouri, Columbia where she earned degrees in Sociology and Psychology, with a minor in Black Studies. Currently, her research involves understanding how Black women are portrayed in the media and how these portrayals relate to Black adolescents’ and young adults’ perceptions of Black women. She is particularly interested in the portrayals and perceptions of Black mothers.

Naila Smith, Ph.D. – Dickinson College

Professor Smith’s research is in the area of developmental psychology. She studies how social and contextual factors (e.g., parent and peer relationships, classroom climate) influence academic and socio-emotional development from childhood through emerging adulthood. She focuses primarily on these developmental processes in immigrant and racial-ethnic minority populations.

Marlean Debreaux, M.A. – Vanderbilt University

Marlena Debreaux is a current doctoral student in the Community Research and Action Program at Vanderbilt University. Previously, she earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Louisville and American University, respectively. Her primary interests are describing the normal developmental experiences of multicultural youth in understudied contexts and analyzing the way in which community institutions and organizations facilitate or inhibit positive youth development for young people of color.  She is specifically interested in determining the ways in which discrimination and socialization experiences contribute to racial and ethnic identity development of African American and Bi-racial identified youth.