Khirsten Wilson

Khirsten J. Wilson is a scholar-practitioner and graduate student in the clinical area of the Psychology Ph.D. program at the University of Notre Dame. She is a 2024 recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP). Her work advances knowledge through community-engaged and culturally responsive research to support the psychological health and well-being of children and families exposed to neighborhood and family stressors in the U.S.

Broadly, she is interested in social processes that may serve as protective factors in the development of psychopathology among children and adolescents experiencing community-level adversity. She adopts a socioecological framework to examine how person-level factors (e.g., impulsivity) and environmental stressors (e.g., concentrated poverty, community violence) interact to influence the development of chronic psychopathology, including traumatic stress symptoms, among Black youth in under-resourced communities.

Khirsten practices and conducts research through a liberation psychology lens. Her work spans research, clinical practice, and policy-level advocacy to promote mental health equity.