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Keisha Clark Career and Legacy

Introduction

Keisha Loraine Washington (née Clark) is a doctoral candidate in Counseling Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she researches relational aggression among Black adolescent girls—the clinical language for what Shanice did to her, turned into a career dedicated to making sure it doesn't happen to other girls. Her academic trajectory is unusual in that its origins are entirely experiential: Keisha did not discover her research interest in a textbook or a classroom. She discovered it by surviving two years of systematic psychological abuse from a peer and realizing that the field studying this phenomenon had almost nothing to say about girls who looked like her.

Education and Academic Formation

Keisha's path to counseling psychology began at the UMD campus visit in January 2015, when she independently toured the College of Education's Benjamin Building while Marcus Washington III toured athletic facilities. There she met Tamara Davis, a second-year graduate student in the school counseling program, and learned about Dr. Patterson's relational aggression research track. The connection was immediate and specific: Keisha recognized her own experience in the research description. Someone was studying the thing that had been done to her. Someone was calling it what it was.

The seed planted during that visit grew over four years of undergraduate work. Keisha entered UMD in fall 2015, initially in the school counseling track through the College of Education. Over the course of her undergraduate career, she shifted toward psychology—drawn increasingly to the research side, to the question of why relational aggression among Black girls was so dramatically understudied and what that absence meant for the girls living through it.

Research Focus and Contributions

The existing literature on relational aggression is overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly middle-class, overwhelmingly suburban. The foundational studies were conducted on populations that do not reflect the experiences of Black girls in urban environments, where relational aggression intersects with respectability politics, racial identity formation, the cultural expectation that Black girls should be grateful for friendship because the world is already hard enough, and the systemic dismissal of interpersonal harm between girls as "drama" rather than abuse.

Keisha knows this gap from the inside. She lived in it. What Shanice did to her—the systematic diminishment, the social manipulation, the weaponizing of friendship—happened within a specific cultural context that the field has not adequately studied. The tools for identifying and treating relational aggression were built for a population that doesn't include girls like Keisha. Her research aims to change that.

Undergraduate Years

During her four years at UMD, Keisha completed her bachelor's degree (likely in Psychology, with possible coursework through the College of Education) while working in Dr. Patterson's relational aggression research lab, gaining research experience and likely co-authoring papers as an undergraduate. She maintained her connection with Tamara Davis as a graduate mentor throughout her undergraduate years. Keisha married Marcus Washington III in spring 2019, before his NBA draft, and graduated that same spring.

PhD in Counseling Psychology

Keisha began her PhD in Counseling Psychology at UMD in fall 2019. The program allows her to do both clinical work and research—she can be Dr. Washington in the therapy room with a sixteen-year-old Black girl who doesn't have words for what her best friend is doing to her, AND she can be Dr. Washington publishing the studies that make the field actually see these girls.

The choice of a PhD over a PsyD reflects Keisha's dual commitment: she wants to help individual girls, but she also wants to generate the research that doesn't exist yet. The data on relational aggression in Black adolescent girls is sparse to nonexistent. Keisha is interested in changing the landscape of what the field knows, not just practicing within existing frameworks.

Her first year was immediately disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Classes went remote. Clinical training was disrupted. Practicum hours shifted to telehealth. Keisha was studying to help people process trauma while the whole country was collectively traumatized—and she was doing it while pregnant with Rochelle Washington, who was born in 2020.

The pandemic affected Keisha's program timeline, as it did for most graduate students in clinical programs during 2020-2021. The specific impact on her progress—whether she took a leave, adjusted her timeline, or powered through—remains to be established.

Dissertation (Projected)

Keisha's dissertation is expected to focus on relational aggression among Black adolescent girls—the population that the field has largely ignored. The specific research questions, methodology, and timeline remain to be established, but the broad trajectory is clear: Keisha intends to produce the data that says this is real, this happens, these girls are not being dramatic, and here's what it does to them.

Academic Appointments and Institutional Roles

Keisha's institutional position as a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland placed her simultaneously in the roles of researcher, emerging clinician, and junior academic. Within Dr. Patterson's relational aggression research lab, she held a research position that gave her experience in study design, data collection, and analysis, work she had begun as an undergraduate and continued at the doctoral level. PhD students in counseling psychology programs typically carry graduate teaching assistantships alongside research responsibilities, providing income and professional development through supporting undergraduate courses in psychology and related fields.

Her choice of a research-focused PhD over a practice-focused PsyD was itself an institutional decision with lasting implications: it positioned her within the research and training pipeline of the field rather than solely within practice settings, and it gave her access to publication venues, grant mechanisms, and scholarly networks that PsyD programs do not center. The University of Maryland's counseling psychology program provided both the research infrastructure her dissertation required and the supervised clinical hours required for eventual licensure as a psychologist.

Teaching and Mentorship

At the doctoral candidate stage, Keisha's teaching experience consisted primarily of graduate teaching assistantships supporting undergraduate psychology courses and possible mentorship of undergraduate research assistants in Dr. Patterson's lab. These early teaching experiences gave her practice explaining research concepts to non-specialist audiences and supervising students in research tasks—competencies she would develop further over the course of a faculty career, if that was the trajectory her career took.

Her own experience of being mentored by Tamara Davis—who provided the initial connection to UMD's counseling psychology program and continued as a graduate mentor through her undergraduate years—informed her approach to relationships with students whose interests aligned with her own. Tamara had offered Keisha something specific rather than generic: a named research track that matched her actual experience, a concrete pathway rather than vague encouragement. Keisha aimed to offer the same quality of specificity to students she mentored in turn.

Major Publications and Scholarly Work

Keisha's publication record remained in its earliest stages at the doctoral candidate level. Her undergraduate research work in Dr. Patterson's lab may have resulted in co-authored contributions to papers examining relational aggression, with her credited as a secondary author on studies she contributed to during her bachelor's degree years. Doctoral programs in counseling psychology typically require students to develop first-author manuscripts during their programs, often drawn from dissertation research or secondary data analyses.

Her dissertation—focused on relational aggression among Black adolescent girls—was positioned to become her first major first-author contribution to the literature, generating data on a population the field had largely excluded from its foundational studies. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted her research timeline during the early years of her doctoral program, affecting data collection access and clinical training hours. Her most significant publications remained prospective during the documented period of her career, a characteristic of early-career scholars whose scholarly impact depends on completing research still in progress.

Professional Relationships and Collaborations

Keisha's most formative professional relationship was with Dr. Patterson, the principal investigator of the relational aggression research lab where Keisha had worked since her undergraduate years and her dissertation advisor through her doctoral program. Dr. Patterson's established research track provided both the intellectual foundation for Keisha's work and the institutional credibility necessary to pursue research on a population the field had systematically overlooked. Their advisor-advisee relationship shaped the core of Keisha's scholarly identity and determined which aspects of the broader relational aggression literature she engaged most deeply.

Tamara Davis represented Keisha's earliest professional mentorship, the graduate student who connected her to UMD's counseling psychology program during a campus visit in January 2015 and whose recognition of Keisha's potential shaped the entire trajectory of her academic career. Tamara was the first person in an academic context to name specifically what the field could offer Keisha—to connect abstract scholarship to the lived experience of a teenager who had survived relational abuse and didn't yet have language for it. That initial relationship established the model for what professional mentorship could look like and what Keisha hoped to offer others in turn.

Public Engagement and Advocacy

Keisha's public engagement at the doctoral candidate stage was limited primarily to academic venues—conference presentations, graduate seminars, and the scholarly networks within counseling psychology and related fields. Her research topic carried inherent advocacy implications: to study relational aggression among Black adolescent girls was to argue through the research itself that these girls had been inadequately served by the existing literature and deserved the empirical attention and clinical resources that had been directed elsewhere.

Whether Keisha extended her engagement beyond academic audiences to reach schools, youth programs, or community organizations working with adolescent girls remained to be established. The animating motivation behind her research—making the field actually useful for girls living through what she had survived—pointed toward eventual work beyond scholarly journals, but her early career was necessarily concentrated on completing the doctoral training and dissertation work that would establish her credibility as a researcher before she could effectively translate that research for broader audiences.

Professional Challenges and Controversies

Keisha's doctoral training was disrupted from its first year by the COVID-19 pandemic, which reached the United States during spring 2020 as she was finishing her first year of graduate study. Clinical practicum hours shifted to telehealth formats or were delayed; dissertation timelines were extended across the field; qualifying exams and proposal defenses moved to remote formats. For Keisha specifically, the disruption coincided with her pregnancy and the birth of Rochelle in 2020, making the pandemic years a period of simultaneous professional disruption and family expansion. The specific effects on her program timeline—whether she formally requested extensions, adjusted her dissertation scope, or completed her degree on schedule despite everything—remained to be established.

Her research focus itself represented an ongoing challenge within academic contexts not accustomed to centering Black girls' experiences as worthy of scholarly attention. Studying a population the field had underserved sometimes required arguing for the significance of the research questions before anyone would engage with the findings. Navigating those dynamics—maintaining rigorous methodology while also advocating for the legitimacy of the work itself—was a persistent feature of early-career scholarship in underrepresented research areas.

Legacy and Impact

At the doctoral candidate stage, Keisha's legacy remained prospective. The impact she intended to have—producing research that would give clinicians better tools for recognizing and treating relational aggression in Black adolescent girls, expanding the empirical base for these girls' experiences—was clearly articulated in her research trajectory even before the publications themselves materialized.

The research she was building toward had direct personal stakes that most scholars never bring to their work. Keisha was not studying an abstract population; she was studying herself at sixteen, surrounded by a field that had almost nothing useful to say about girls who looked like her. If her career developed along the trajectory her graduate training established, she was positioned to become a meaningful contributor to a literature with genuine gaps, and to be the kind of practitioner-researcher who had not existed when she most needed one.

Careers Academics Keisha Clark