Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor

Harvard University

Dr. Adriana Umaña-Taylor is a Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her areas of expertise include ethnic-racial identity development, school and family influences on identity formation, and understanding processes of risk and resilience among ethnic-racial minority youth. Her work is informed by developmental and socio-cultural ecological frameworks, and seeks to uncover how adolescents’ ethnic-racial identity develops in the context of family, school, and communities, and the conditions under which it can serve as an asset that protects adolescents from culturally informed risk factors such as ethnic-racial discrimination. She developed the Identity Project intervention, a school-based curriculum, which has demonstrated promising results for increasing adolescents’ ethnic-racial identity and having positive downstream impacts on students’ academic and psychosocial outcomes. In her projects, Dr. Umaña-Taylor seeks to apply developmental science in a manner that reduces ethnic-racial disparities in psychological and academic adjustment and, in turn, promotes social justice.

Areas of Expertise

• Race and Ethnicity
• Adolescent Development
• Ethnic-Racial Identity
• Developmental Psychology

Methodology

• Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR)
• Experimental
• Focus Groups
• Interviews
• Mixed Methods
• Qualitative Methods
• Quantitative Methods
• Randomized Control Trials (RCTs)
• Survey Methods and Questionnaires