Email: ug264@nyu.edu
Program: PhD in Counseling Psychology
Year entered Program: 2023
Research Interests: Structural and systemic drivers of trauma, violence, and oppression; hope, agency, and self-efficacy among system-impacted youth; community-based advocacy and culturally-adapted interventions.
Principal Advisor(s): Dr. Shabnam Javdani
Research Description/Bio:
Uma is a doctoral student in Clinical/Counseling Psychology under the mentorship of Dr. Shabnam Javdani. Her research examines how structural conditions and systemic responses within the juvenile legal and child welfare systems shape the lives of youth and families, with the goal of developing and testing trauma-informed, culturally-adapted, and community-based interventions for those who have been historically and currently marginalized. Grounded in community psychology and abolitionist feminist perspectives, she is particularly interested in how resource precarity, access to opportunity, and navigational efficacy shape system-impacted young people's hope, agency, and capacity to imagine self-determined futures.
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. Uma received her B.S. in Applied Psychology from NYU and her M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.