Dr. Kerrie Wilkins-Yel

Kerrie is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in Counseling, School Psychology and Sport at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Before joining UMass Boston, she was an assistant professor of Counseling and Educational Psychology at Indiana University.

Her research focuses on equity, justice and access, both at work and in the pursuit of work. She takes an intersectional approach to how oppression and marginalization shape the academic and career development of women of color in STEM, pairing quantitative methods, such as surveys and scale validation, with qualitative ones, such as grounded theory and photovoice. Her work has been cited nearly 2,000 times.

Beyond research, she builds culturally sustaining interventions through research-practice partnerships. She founded and co-directs the multi-institutional I CAN PERSIST STEM Initiative, a counterspace that advances STEM persistence among women and girls of color. Her work has been supported by approximately $5 million in federal and private grants.

She is an NSF CAREER Fellow and has received the American Psychological Association’s Emerging Leader for Women in Psychology Award and the Society for Counseling Psychology’s Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Counseling Psychology. At DASS she brings mixed-methods and qualitative expertise to projects that need both the numbers and the lived experience behind them.