Richard “Dick” Abidin Early Career Award Winner: Angela Narayan, PhD

Richard “Dick” Abidin Early Career Award Winner: Angela Narayan, PhD

SCCAP is delighted to present this year’s Richard “Dick” Abidin Early Career Award and Grant to Angela Narayan, Ph.D. The award honors Richard “Dick” Abidin, longtime member and treasurer of SCCAP. It is intended to recognize an early career psychologist whose line of research has significantly contributed to our understanding of child and adolescent mental health, and to support the awardee in extending their current program of research.

Dr. Narayan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Denver. Her work focuses on the intergenerational transmission of risk and resilience and the effects of parents’ childhood experiences on their relational and parenting dynamics and their children’s mental health outcomes. Her research has been supported by The Guardian of Angels Foundation, the Society for Research in Child Development, The Ford Foundation, The Coydog Foundation, and the NIMH. She is the author of the Benevolent Childhood Experiences scale, which is widely used to assess positive childhood experiences in a culturally sensitive way.

As the Abidin Early Career Award winner, Dr. Narayan will receive $20,000 from SCCAP to support her program of research. Dr. Narayan proposed two projects as part of her application. The first aims to evaluate informant discrepancies about why minoritized youth were removed from their biological family by child protective services. Dr. Narayan will make use of records that include both the official reason for the youth’s removal as well as the youth’s report about why they were removed to describe differences in the two perspectives. This will be an important initial step toward a larger goal of elevating youth voices and promoting antiracist methods in research on child maltreatment. Dr. Narayan’s second proposed project is to add a follow-up assessment to her ongoing study of 252 people, recruited while pregnant, and the non-gestational parent. These parents have been studied from pregnancy through the child’s kindergarten year; the Abidin Award will support a first grade follow-up. The goals of this study are to understand (1) parent and child experiences of racial discrimination, (2) how the parents’ caregivers protected them from racial discrimination, and (3) how the parents are working to protect their own children. The data collected in the first grade follow-up will help to elucidate how racial discrimination affects youth mental health and academic outcomes, and how parental racial socialization can mitigate these consequences. 

Dr. Narayan has authored or co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed articles. She has spoken at national and international meetings on youth mental health, and has been selected for other prestigious awards including the Early Career Award for Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health (ZERO TO THREE), Early Career Award for Child Maltreatment (APA Division 37), and the Early Career Award for Racial and Ethnic Minority Psychologists in Trauma Psychology (APA Division 56). She completed her PhD at the University of Minnesota, and her postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.

Please join us in recognizing Dr. Narayan as the 2024 Abidin Early Career Award recipient!