Donte Bernard is a second year NIMH T32 Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Crime Victims Research & Treatment Center at the Medical University of South Carolina. He earned his BA in Psychology from Kansas State University and his PhD in Clinical Psychology at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research aims to understand the psychological and behavioral health consequences of racism-related stress (e.g., racial discrimination) among Black youth and emerging adults. In particular, he is interested in investigating how racial risk and protective factors shape how Black youth and emerging adults perceive, respond, and cope with racial discrimination. His current research examines 1) how racial discrimination confers risk to internalizing mental health symptoms, including the impostor phenomenon; 2) how culturally related risk and protective factors at the individual and contextual level influence and/or explain the association between racial discrimination and mental health; and 3) the intersection between racial discrimination and traumatic stress among Black youth. His research leverages both quantitative and qualitative methods to allow for Black youth to inject their voices, perspectives, and experiences into scholarly spaces that have otherwise been exclusionary. The predominant goal of his research is to identify how and why racism-related stress leads to poor mental health outcomes including trauma sequelae, so as to inform the development of interventions to promote resilience and positive psychosocial adjustment in the face of racism-related adversity.
