PhD Candidate in the clinical psychology program at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center
Gina (Diagou) Sissoko is a doctoral candidate in the clinical psychology program at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and women, gender, and sexuality studies from Hunter College. Gina works under the advisement of Dr. Kevin Nadal, and her research focuses on the impact of colorism, gendered racism, and trauma on Black women and girls’ mental health and criminal legal involvement. Her dissertation is a critical participatory action research project focused on the impact and manifestation of colorism among Black adolescent girls. Gina is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a NASEM Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow. In 2021, she was recognized with the Distinguished Student Diversity Award by the Society of Clinical Psychology for her contributions related to diversity in clinical science training, service, and research. At CUNY, Gina served as the diversity chair in the clinical program at John Jay from 2019-2021, founded the CUNY Diversity Science Initiative, and currently serves as a diversity student representative to the Graduate Center psychology department. As part of her clinical training, Gina has worked in forensic assessment, substance use, child and adolescent psychiatry, and most recently, child welfare settings. Starting in July 2023, Gina will complete her predoctoral clinical psychology internship training year at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Gina was born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, and is the daughter of Malian immigrants. Since 2012, she has been a proud resident of the Bronx, New York.
Gina’s scholarship centrally examines the intersecting effects of colorism and gendered racism, structural oppression, and gender-based violence on mental health and criminal legal involvement among Black women and girls. She has authored several quantitative, qualitative, and conceptual peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, including on the impact of skin tone-related variables on mental health outcomes, the role of colorism on the criminalization of Black girls, microaggressions against racial minority immigrants, and mothering within the criminal legal system. Her work has been supported by several internal and external grants and fellowships, including the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Ford Foundation/National Academies of the Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Gina employs a variety of methods steeped in traditions of Black Feminist methodology and liberatory praxis. For example, her dissertation employed a critical participatory action research framework to study the manifestation and impact of colorism on Black adolescent girls. Over six weeks, ten adolescent girls served as her co-researchers, and together, they developed a research protocol, collected data, and produced a Zine to distribute the findings to stakeholders. Through this type of work, Gina aims to pursue a career focused on developing an evidence base for gender-, race- and trauma-informed healing interventions and policy.