PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS
Shabnam Javdani
[ Google Scholar • NYU • ResearchGate • OrcID ]
Dr. Shabnam Javdani is Associate Professor of Applied Psychology in the Counseling Psychology program at New York University, and founded the RISE Team in 2012. Her scholarship examines and disrupts the impact of persistent social inequity through community, policy, and systems solutions that promote access and self-determination for historically disenfranchised groups. Focusing on women, girls, and LGB/ TGNC people using a race-equity lens, she engages research-practice-policy partners to study and change systems in real time; and to advance sustainable structural solutions that uproot complex social challenges with a focus on mass incarceration, juvenile legal and child welfare policy, persistent poverty, housing instability, and educational pushout. She has published over 75 manuscripts and her scholarship is supported by competitive federal, state, and private funding. She is also Associate Director of the NYU Prison Education Program, which aims to expand access to higher education within communities impacted by the criminal justice system.
Erin Godfrey
[ Google Scholar • NYU • ResearchGate • OrcID ]
Dr. Godfrey is an Associate Professor of Applied Psychology in the Psychology and Social Intervention program at New York University. Her scholarship examines human development in the context of systemic oppression. She integrates multiple disciplinary perspectives to understand and change the psychological processes that underlie people’s responses to systemic oppression; address the psychological, developmental, and societal consequences of these responses; and unpack the ways in which systemic oppression can be disrupted in systems and settings. She has published over 60 manuscripts and her scholarship is supported by competitive federal, state, and private funding. She is also the director of the Institute for Human Development and Social Change at NYU.
CO-INVESTIGATORS
Sireen Irsheid
Sireen Irsheid is an Assistant Professor at the Silver School of Social Work at New York University. Sireen received her BA in Developmental Psychology from DePaul University, her Masters in Social Work from Columbia University, and her PhD from the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. As a critical race scholar, her research and practice focus on the complex interplay between race, education, mental health, and structural violence. Specifically, her work takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the multidimensional aspects of systemic racism and place-based contextual processes that shape the circumstances of students who are disproportionately impacted by education inequities. Sireen is also a licensed clinical social worker and holds certificates in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Her extensive clinical practice experience working as a school social worker with students who are impacted by legacies of colonialism and structural racism has reinforced her commitment to challenge prevailing systemic mechanisms that perpetuate mental health and education inequities. As part of the RWJF network and a Health Policy Research Scholar Alumni, Sireen leverages her practice experience and scholarship to build viable education and health policy solutions with the goal to disrupt mechanisms of inequity for Black and Brown young people. Her commitment to anti-oppressive research and practice extend to her teaching that encourages the use of self-reflexivity, co-participation in knowledge production, and to develop an orientation to our professional and personal lives to foster an anti-racist future across multiple practice domains.
RESEARCH AND INTERVENTION STAFF
Alex Desire
Alexandria Desire (she/her) is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) in the state of New York and a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in New Jersey. Alexandria completed her Bachelor of Arts (BA) at Vanderbilt University. She also received a Master’s of Arts in Psychology (MA) from New York University and a Master’s of Science in Education in Mental Health Counseling (MSEd) from Fordham University. In the last few years, she has provided therapy to individuals and families in the greater New York City area largely focused on community based mental health. She works with clients with anxiety, depression or trauma related histories. Alexandria routinely uses a blended approach using mindfulness, cognitive behavioral and a trauma focused lens. Alexandria uses her background in community based therapy and previous research experience to guide her efforts in her role as a Project Coordinator.
Amira Silverman
Amira Silverman (she/her) is a doctoral student in the Psychology and Social Intervention (PSI) program in the Applied Psychology Department at NYU Steinhardt. Amira’s research focuses on understanding socialization to violence perpetration among individuals with power and privilege and how seemingly disparate acts of violence are deeply connected and enacted through shared structural processes. As a trained Intergroup Relations (IGR) facilitator, Amira is also interested in interventions utilizing social justice education pedagogy to disrupt patterns of socialization that maintain ecologies of oppression. On the RISE team, Amira works on the SAFE Spaces Project, coordinating data collection and data management.
De’Ja Causey
De’Ja Causey (she/they) received a BA in Psychology and Child & Adolescent Mental Health from the NYU College of Arts and Sciences in Spring 2023. As a former advocate with ROSES, De’Ja is thrilled to continue working with the team as a Program Supervisor for ROSES, Project Lead for the second iteration of the Girls’ Justice Initiative (GJI 2.0) in collaboration with the NYS Unified Court System, and Project Coordinator at RISE. De’Ja’s research interests include the impact of expanded accessibility of affordable medical services in under-resourced communities on long-term mental health outcomes for Black children and adolescents, as well as the intersection of multidisciplinary visual art education and treatment of anxiety disorders and physical disabilities among Black youth. Additionally, De’Ja plans to pursue an MA or PhD in Art Therapy.
Genevieve Sims
Genevieve Sims (she/her/they) is the associate director and a supervisor to the ROSES program, which she first joined as an NYU undergraduate advocate in 2016. Since graduating with a B.S. in Applied Psychology, Global Public Health, and a minor in ethnomusicology in 2017, Genevieve has overseen hundreds of rounds of ROSES advocacy, train the trainer (TTT) dissemination of the program, and has also worked on data technical assistance and evaluation projects for programs like the Ending Girls Incarceration Initiative (EGI) and the Young Women’s Freedom Center (YWFC). Genevieve is now advancing her education with a masters degree in music therapy at NYU, which they hope to integrate with personal and professional experiences in order to continue to create accessible spaces for personal well-being and liberation work for girls, gender-nonconforming and trans teens.
Iris Mann
Iris (she/her) received a BA in Psychology from Skidmore College and is a Q.U.E.S.T. NYU alumna. Her research interests center trauma-informed care for system-impacted young people and the role of racialization in clinical decision making and counseling. Iris is also a trained Intergroup Relations (IGR) facilitator. She utilizes these experiences and her past work with other community based participatory research projects to guide her role as Outreach Coordinator for SAFE Spaces.
Julez Thompson
Julez (they/them) received a B.S. from the Applied Psychology program at NYU Steinhardt in Spring 2022. They have been a research assistant on the Data Brigade team since August 2021 and is currently a Cross-Project Coordinator. Their research interests include the impact of gender responsive practices on mental health outcomes on system-involved young girls and gender non-conforming youth. They plan to pursue a Masters related to community psychology or social intervention.
DOCTORAL STUDENTS
Jason Rarick
Jason is a doctoral candidate in the Psychology & Social Intervention program in the Department of Applied Psychology at NYU Steinhardt. His research examines how individual’s experiences of socioeconomic and sociocultural inequality shape developmental pathways for their health and education. His current work is focused on education and is guided by the following questions: How do students incorporate information from their surrounding social settings (e.g., peers, schools) to make sense of their own relative experiences with inequality? Second, how exactly do key psychosocial processes (e.g. social comparison, self-beliefs, attributions) help us understand the role inequality plays in education beyond resource differences? Originally from Los Angeles, California, Jason received his master’s in educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin before coming to New York. Jason’s advisor and research mentor is Dr. Erin Godfrey.
McKenzie Berezin
McKenzie Berezin is a fourth year fellow in the Counseling Psychology doctoral program under the mentorship of Dr. Shabnam Javdani. Her work strives to connect research, practice, and policy, through enacting and evaluating systems change efforts across child serving systems including child welfare, education, and legal with attention to gender and racial disparities. McKenzie’s research also supports local and national efforts to disrupt girls’ pathways across child serving systems in partnership with court- and community-based organizations through the implementation of gender- and trauma-responsive practices and policies. McKenzie also supports the work of local and international programming that aims to investigate the structural drivers of physical, mental, and sexual health disparities among adolescents and, how they can be bolstered through community-based programming and policy change.
Natalie May
Natalie May is a Doctoral Fellow in Applied Psychology (Psychology and Social Intervention) at New York University. Broadly, her research draws on developmental psychology, implementation science, and community psychology to understand how educational and community contexts in youth’s lives affect their wellbeing, social-emotional development, and sense of self. Supervised by Drs. Erin Godfrey and Shabnam Javdani, Natalie is a graduate student researcher with the Blueprints Project. She is specifically interested in understanding how youth move between educational and juvenile justice spaces, and how these systems can better support their own educational goals. Additionally, she is the coordinator for the Path Pilot Project (under Drs. Elise Cappella, Kristie Patten, and Anil Chako), a whole-school inclusion model for students who benefit from additional emotional and behavioral supports. Natalie holds both a Masters degree and Bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University.
Raquel Rose
Jamaican-raised, Raquel immigrated to the US in 2003 to continue her secondary and higher education. She graduated in May of 2013 from Stony Brook University with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology (plus a minor in Biology) and is honored to now be a Doctoral student at NYU! Her research interests include the prevention and treatment of trauma, the impact of systematic discrimination and health disparities on future success, and culturally-sensitive evidence-based interventions for at-risk populations, including incarcerated and immigrant youth and their families. Raquel currently works on the juvenile justice research team at NYU Langone Medical Center with IDEAS faculty member Dr. Christopher Branson and is excited to continue working with this at-risk population. Outside of work, Raquel is an amateur violinist, writer and cat mom to two Siberians.
Uma Guarnaccia
Uma Guarnaccia is a doctoral student in Counseling Psychology under the mentorship of Dr. Shabnam Javdani. Her research interests lie in understanding how the juvenile legal and child welfare systems respond to youth and families, in order to develop and test trauma-informed, culturally-adapted, and community-based interventions for those who have been historically and currently marginalized and minoritized. She is committed to building research-community partnerships to inform her work and increase access to mental health services in under-resourced communities. Uma’s previous scholarship has focused on the implementation of trauma-informed and culturally-responsive trainings for staff in the child welfare system, as well as the development of a healing and empowerment intervention for women who had been impacted by gun violence and/or incarceration. She received her B.S. in Applied Psychology from NYU and her M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
Haja Kamara
Haja Kamara is a doctoral student in the Counseling Psychology program at New York University Steinhardt under the mentorship of Dr. Shabnam Javdani. Haja is interested in conducting interdisciplinary research that addresses mental health disparities among youth of color, particularly those who have experienced trauma. Further, Haja aims to illuminate the unique challenges faced by marginalized youth and to develop innovative, empowering interventions. Her focus lies in the realm of school-based interventions, where she hopes to develop environments that not only recognize the diverse experiences of marginalized students but also nurture their mental health and resilience. Haja’s previous research focused on the development and implementation of a comprehensive sex education curriculum for students in grades K-8. Haja received her BS in Psychology from Yale and her MPH with a concentration in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Yale School of Public Health.