Lab Director

Dr. Deborah Rivas-Drake is a Professor of Psychology and Education at the University of Michigan. Together with the Contexts of Academic + Socioemotional Adjustment (CASA) Lab, she examines how school, peer, and family settings can support adolescents in navigating issues related to race and ethnicity, and how these experiences inform young people’s academic, socioemotional, and civic development. Currently funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation and National Science Foundation, her work seeks to illuminate promising practices that disrupt racism and xenophobia and that help set diverse young people on trajectories of positive contribution to their schools and communities. Her book, Below the Surface: Talking with Teens about Race, Ethnicity, and Identity (Princeton University Press), received the Social Policy Book Award from the Society for Research on Adolescence and the Eleanor Maccoby Award in Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association.

Email | drivas@umich.edu