Meet the Staff

Maryam M. Jernigan is a doctoral candidate in Counseling Psychology at Boston College. She has been recognized and rewarded for her academic accomplishments, which include the 2008 APA/APAGS Award for Distinguished Graduate Student in Professional Psychology, the 2008 Many Faces of Counseling Psychology Award, and the Donald J. White Teaching Fellow Excellence Award. Ms. Jernigan is a student affiliate of the American Psychological Association and member of Divisions 17 (Counseling Psychology), 35-1 (Society for the Psychology of Black Women), and 45 (Ethnic Diversity). Maryam has worked with the Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture (ISPRC) since the summer of 2004 as a graduate research assistant assisting in the publication of scholarly articles, grant preparation, coordination of the annual Diversity Challenge and Summer Program conferences, and serving as an official representative for ISPRC on several committees in the Boston College community.

As a graduate student, Ms. Jernigan developed the Sankofa Group Project, a program that utilizes group intervention techniques to help Black and Latina girls in predominantly White schools develop their social and political awareness of threats to their academic achievement and to promote positive racial identity development in null or hostile racial environments.  Ms. Jernigan's work with the Sankofa Group Project earned her the Ford Foundation Diversity Dissertation Fellowship 2007.  Other areas of research interest include the racial identity development of children and adolescents, culturally appropriate assessment and intervention, and the intersection of race and clinical supervision.

In her spare time, Maryam is always in search of the love of her life (and a nice pair of shoes!).