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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 and completed a B.A. in Psychology 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.

Keisha’s own experience preceded her introduction to the field. She had survived two years of Shanice’s psychological abuse and wanted to become the person she had needed during that period: someone who would recognize the abuse, take it seriously, and help a girl find a way out. The clinical and research ambitions were inseparable for her. She wanted to help individual adolescents while also improving the knowledge and tools available to the people treating them.

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.

The visit gave Keisha an academic name and a concrete route for a concern she already understood personally. While Marcus Washington III toured the athletic facilities, she pursued her own interests in the College of Education. Discovering research, intervention models, and school-based prevention work devoted to harmful peer relationships made the prospect of studying them feel attainable. During her undergraduate years, she became increasingly interested in the research side of that work and in whose experiences the available studies represented.

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.

She chose the PhD because she wanted a career combining clinical work with original research. For Keisha, working directly with an adolescent who could not yet name her friend’s abuse and producing studies that helped the field recognize such experiences were complementary responsibilities.

Research Focus and Contributions

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.

Keisha questioned how well research centered on white, middle-class, suburban populations served Black girls in urban communities. Her concern was with the adequacy and applicability of that knowledge: the ways racial marginalization, pressure over appearance and respectability, and expectations about maintaining friendships could intersect with coercion and social exclusion. These were not abstract questions to her. Shanice had used friendship to diminish her, and Keisha had struggled to find recognition of that harm in the ways adults and peers discussed conflict between girls.

Her research aimed to strengthen the empirical basis for recognizing those experiences and their consequences. She wanted clinicians to have better means of identifying covert abuse and responding to girls whose distress had been dismissed as drama.

Academic Appointments and Institutional Roles

Keisha worked in Dr. Patterson’s relational aggression research lab as an undergraduate and continued there during her doctoral studies. The research position involved study design, data collection, and analysis. At the doctoral level, she combined that work with clinical training and graduate teaching assistantships supporting undergraduate psychology courses.

The university gave her access to an established research program, scholarly networks, and supervised practice. Her doctoral role required her to develop as a researcher, clinician, and teacher while completing her own dissertation.

Teaching and Mentorship

Keisha’s early teaching experience came primarily through her graduate teaching assistantships. Supporting undergraduate psychology courses gave her practice explaining research concepts to students who were still learning the field and helping them understand research tasks.

Tamara’s mentorship shaped what Keisha hoped to offer students in turn. At seventeen, Keisha had received a named research track, a relevant mentor, and an intelligible path into the work that mattered to her. She valued that specificity and aimed to provide similarly concrete guidance, connecting a student’s actual interests with opportunities instead of offering encouragement without a route forward.

Major Publications and Scholarly Work

Keisha’s dissertation focused on relational aggression among Black adolescent girls. While developing it, she intended the dissertation to become her first major first-author contribution: research that would document girls’ experiences and the effects of abuse that others minimized. Her earlier lab work supplied experience in designing studies and collecting and analyzing data. The dissertation formed the central scholarly project of the doctorate she subsequently completed.

Professional Relationships and Collaborations

Dr. Patterson supervised the lab in which Keisha worked and served as her dissertation advisor. Their relationship extended from undergraduate research through doctoral study. Patterson’s research program gave Keisha an intellectual foundation, institutional support, and a framework within which to pursue her own questions about Black adolescent girls’ experiences.

Tamara was Keisha’s earliest academic mentor. Their relationship continued during Keisha’s undergraduate and doctoral education. The January 2015 introduction mattered because Tamara connected scholarship with something Keisha had lived through, recognizing both the relevance of that experience and the possibility of an academic future. Keisha carried that example into her own approach to mentorship.

Public Engagement and Advocacy

During her doctoral training, Keisha’s engagement was concentrated in academic settings, including conference presentations, graduate seminars, and scholarly networks within counseling psychology and related fields. Her research also carried an advocacy purpose: she wanted Black girls’ experiences to receive sustained empirical attention and appropriate clinical resources.

Her ambition extended beyond publication itself. She wanted the field’s knowledge to be useful to adolescents living through the kinds of friendships she had survived, and to the people responsible for helping them.

Professional Challenges and Controversies

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 affected access to research participants and clinical hours while she was building the foundations of her doctoral work. It coincided with her pregnancy and the 2020 birth of Rochelle Washington. She continued through the program while raising Rochelle and ultimately completed the doctorate.

Keisha also encountered the work of establishing why her research questions deserved attention. In academic settings that did not routinely center Black girls’ experiences, she sometimes had to argue for the significance of those questions before others would engage with the findings. She sought to maintain methodological rigor while defending the legitimacy of the subject itself.

Legacy and Impact

Keisha’s intended contribution was both clinical and scholarly: better tools for recognizing relational aggression, a stronger empirical account of Black adolescent girls’ experiences, and care that did not dismiss psychological abuse because it occurred within a friendship. Those aims were established while she was still training. Her own experience at sixteen gave the work continuing personal stakes, and she pursued the undergraduate research, supervised clinical training, and dissertation through which she completed her doctorate.

Careers Academics Psychologists Researchers Keisha Clark