Wizdom Powell, PhD, MPH

Dr. Powell is an expert in racial trauma, justice, and healing who serves as Creative Diversity Director at Headspace Health. At Headspace Health, she is leading efforts to design and implement principles for inclusive product and content design. She holds an honorary professorship at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, a tenured professorship at UCONN and maintains an adjunct faculty position at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her National Institutes of Health-funded research focuses on building mHealth applications to support real-time modulation of racialized stress in U.S. Black communities. As a restorative justice practitioner, she consults with mental health leaders and community health workers in Kigali, Rwanda to reimagine services delivery for survivors (and their descendants) of the genocide against the Tutsi. She leverages her collective expertise as a consultant to non-profit, philanthropic, and private sector entities. Currently, she serves as the brand consultant for Dove Men+Care and assists organizations, corporate entities, and communities around the world with centering racial equity, justice, and healing in their strategic initiatives. She has also consulted with the Urban Institute and Brookings Institute on equity initiatives focused on low-income and minoritized males. She has published numerous op-eds, policy briefs, peer-reviewed articles, and book chapters including ones in the American Journal of Public Health, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Journal of Traumatic Stress, Behavioral Medicine, and Child Development. In addition to being a White House Fellow, she is an American Psychological Association (APA) Minority, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Kaiser Permanente Burch Leadership, Institute of African American Research, and Ford Foundation Fellow who received a Ph.D. and M.S. in Clinical Psychology and M.P.H. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. In recognition of her public service to boys and men, she received the American Psychological Association’s (D51) Distinguished Professional Service Award. In 2015, she received the prestigious Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Outstanding Artistic and Scholarly Achievement by Young Faculty. Dr. Powell was awarded a 2017 academic writing residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy from the Rockefeller Foundation. Most recently, she received the Connecticut Psychological Associations Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Science Award, the Community Healing Network’s 2021 Community Healer Award, and was named one of the 25 Essential Voices in Black mental health.