Nickholas Grant, PhD, was a 2021 recipient of the Community Psychology Graduate Student Award for Anti-Racist Praxis from the Society for Community Research and Action, Division 27 of the American Psychological Association.
Grant completed his Doctoral Psychology Fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry with placements at The Consultation Center and The West Haven Mental Health Center. Grant earned his PhD in Clinical and Community Psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He will be staying at Yale for a T-32 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Substance Abuse Prevention within the Division of Prevention and Community Research in the department.
Grant's youth participatory action research dissertation, #PowerUp, examines sites of resilience to gun violence, centering African American youth and conceptualizing resilience as a feature of the community itself. He has sustained community-university partnership with oppressed communities across multiple community-based research and evaluation projects. His commitment to anti-racist praxis extends to working within the university by taking on leadership in supporting the Psychology Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the Yale Department of Psychiatry to address equity in their programs. The anti-racist praxis has been applied in the classroom by implementing an empancipatory pedagogical approach and challenging students to think structurally.