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Keisha Clark (Career and Legacy)

Keisha Loraine Clark, later Keisha Loraine Washington, was a counseling psychology researcher whose work centered on relational aggression among Black adolescent girls. She completed both her undergraduate psychology degree and her Counseling Psychology doctorate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her doctoral education combined research with supervised clinical training.

Career Overview

Keisha entered UMD in fall 2015, majored in psychology, and graduated in spring 2019. She began UMD’s Counseling Psychology PhD program that fall and later completed the doctorate. Her training followed the program’s scientist-practitioner model, integrating psychological research with counseling practice.

Her primary field was relational aggression among Black adolescent girls, with particular attention to social exclusion, coercive friendship dynamics, covert peer abuse, and the ways harm between girls could be dismissed as ordinary interpersonal conflict. The work grew from an interest she had begun articulating as a high-school senior: counseling teenage girls and giving them language for psychologically abusive peer relationships.

Education and Academic Formation

During the January 2015 campus visit, Keisha toured the Benjamin Building with graduate student Tamara Davis. Tamara introduced her to Dr. Patterson’s spring lecture series on relational aggression, social exclusion, and covert peer abuse; the associated research lab studied adolescent girls and school-based prevention. Tamara also gave Keisha a packet summarizing three years of the lab’s research.

Keisha entered UMD in fall 2015 as a psychology major. During her undergraduate years, she joined Dr. Patterson’s research lab and gained experience with study design, data collection, and analysis. She remained in contact with Tamara, whose combination of counseling practice and research gave Keisha an early model for the work she wanted to pursue.

After graduating in spring 2019, Keisha entered UMD’s Counseling Psychology PhD program. Her doctoral training included research methods, psychological theory, ethics, multicultural psychology, assessment, supervised counseling practica, externship work, and a doctoral internship.

Research and Clinical Practice

Keisha’s dissertation focused on relational aggression among Black adolescent girls. Her work addressed a population that had been poorly represented in foundational research on peer aggression and examined the interaction among covert abuse, school and friendship dynamics, racial identity, and the dismissal of interpersonal harm as “drama.”

Her clinical training allowed her to work directly with adolescents while her research developed tools for recognizing and responding to the same patterns at a broader level.

COVID-19 and Doctoral Training

The COVID-19 pandemic began during the second semester of Keisha’s first doctoral year. Coursework and academic meetings moved online, and portions of her clinical training shifted to telehealth or were delayed. The disruption coincided with her pregnancy and the 2020 birth of Rochelle Washington. She continued through the program and ultimately completed the doctorate.

Mentorship

Tamara’s early mentorship remained influential because she had given Keisha a concrete academic route when Keisha was seventeen. Their relationship continued during Keisha’s undergraduate and doctoral education.

Careers Academics Psychologists Researchers Keisha Clark