Nolan T. Krueger, Ph.D.
Portrait of Nolan T. Krueger, Ph.D., psychologist and UC Santa Barbara professor, outdoors in late afternoon light.

Nolan T. Krueger

Licensed Psychologist and Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at UC Santa Barbara

I study what sustains people who do demanding work under structural pressure, and what wears them down. My research follows three lines. One looks at the well-being of QTBIPOC activists, one at belonging and suicide risk among Multiracial young people, and one at how isolation and support affect men's mental health, especially Black men. At UCSB I also direct the Wellness and Empowerment Initiative, the Kindred Collective for Healing and Liberatory Traditions, and the Carol Ackerman Positive Psychology Clinic.

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Google Scholar CV Kindred Collective Positive Psychology Clinic
About

Psychologist and professor at UC Santa Barbara.

I'm a licensed psychologist and an assistant professor of counseling psychology at UC Santa Barbara's Gevirtz School of Education, where I've been on the faculty since 2023. My home is the counseling emphasis of the Combined Counseling/Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology. I trained in counseling psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, completed my internship and postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley's Counseling and Psychological Services, and I'm affiliate faculty with UCSB's Center for Black Studies Research.

My research follows two lines. The first is Multiracial lived experience: the stressors specific to being Multiracial, the strengths and forms of identity that come with it, and the monoracism that shapes Multiracial people's mental health. The second is social justice and mental health in Black and other minoritized communities, including what sustains people in the work of resistance and what wears them down. Both ask how people stay whole in systems that don't recognize them, and both draw on radical healing (healing that resists the conditions that caused the harm), Survivance (active presence and the refusal of erasure), Sankofa (returning for what we need to move forward), and liminality (living between categories that systems fail to validate).

This work comes from my own life as a Multiracial Black man. I grew up in predominantly white spaces and in diverse ones, and the experiences were very different. In white spaces, people often couldn't make sense of my experience as a Multiracial Black person. In diverse spaces, they could. Being a man in those spaces also taught me to guard myself early, and I've seen what that costs in friendship and in asking for help. I come from a family of Black community builders and social justice educators whose work for racial justice and equity left a mark on their communities. That commitment took on a personal edge through my own experience with the criminal legal system, and it pulled me toward disparities in both higher education and the legal system. I began with the effects of race-related and minority status stressors on mental health and academic outcomes, and over time I came to see healing, equity, and justice as resistance to oppressive systems, as collective empowerment, and as a return to approaches to wellness that our communities have long held. My dissertation on racial homelessness, the experience of not belonging to any racial community, examined it as a risk factor for suicidal ideation among Multiracial young adults and was supported by a Ford Foundation predoctoral fellowship.

I also serve as an elected member of the American Psychological Association's Committee on Ethnic Minority Affairs, sit on the editorial boards of the Journal of Black Psychology and the Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, and am a founding member of Black Men in Psychology.

Recognition

  • UC Office of the President Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Award, 2026
  • Margaret T. Getman Service to Students Award, UC Santa Barbara, 2026
  • Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship, 2025
  • Congressional and California legislative recognition for the Kindred Collective and for Flourish & Flow, 2025
  • Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, 2019
Nolan Krueger seated against a painted seawall, looking toward the water.
Research

Current lines of research.

Most of this work sits within the Wellness and Empowerment Initiative for Multiracial and BIPOC Communities (WE-I), the lab I direct at UCSB. Across these projects I look at the conditions around people, more than individual traits, to understand what supports well-being and what wears it down.

Activist well-being

Sustaining the Movement

A national mixed-methods study of 815 QTBIPOC activists (queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color) across 45 states and the District of Columbia, asking what keeps people in justice work and what drives them out. The study looks at how distress, commitment, hope, and collective coping sit together in activists' lives, and at the part community plays, including whether people believe the groups they belong to can act together and change anything. With the Memphis Tenants Union, WE-I is using the study to build an Activist Health Playbook for organizers. Supported by the UC Office of the President's Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Award.

Multiracial mental health

Belonging, Multiracial identity, and suicide risk

Multiracial Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the United States, and Multiracial adolescents and young adults report suicidal thoughts and behaviors at higher rates than their monoracial peers. This line of work started with my dissertation on racial homelessness, the experience of not belonging to any racial community, and what it means for suicide risk and for how clinicians assess it. Project BRAVE extends this work qualitatively, following how Multiracial youth, with Multiracial Black youth as the primary focus, experience identity, belonging, and support across school, family, and community, alongside their caregivers and school staff. Supported by the Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship.

Men's well-being

Isolation, support, and men's mental health

This line of work asks why support doesn't always reach men and what isolation has to do with it. With colleagues, I studied how perceived isolation shapes the effect of support on Black men's mental health, published in the Journal of Black Psychology's special issue on Black men and mental health. I'm also part of a collaborative autoethnography of Black men in counseling psychology.

Training

Beyond Single-Issue Learning

A framework for counseling psychology training built on the idea that how a course is held teaches as much as what it covers: its rituals, its physical spaces, the relationships in the room, and its movement between the university and community settings. Critical consciousness has to be formed rather than delivered, and whether it lasts depends on the ecology of training more than the curriculum. I've taught the course built on it three times in UCSB's doctoral program, and a longitudinal study with the University of Denver follows the same trainees from the end of the course into clinical practice to see what stays with them.

Higher education

Defunded DEI and academic pathways

An interview study of how the defunding of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, programs, and positions is reshaping the academic and professional pathways of faculty, students, and academic administrators of color, and what it is doing to them emotionally. The study asks how people make sense of lost positions, programs, and communities of support, how those losses change decisions about where to study, work, and stay, and what carrying them costs. Interviews with faculty, students, and academic administrators are underway.

Also underway

Student-led projects on racial concordance in autism care and on provider perspectives on involuntary psychiatric commitment.

Nolan Krueger smiling while seated in a circle on the grass with community members at Flourish & Flow.
In conversation at Flourish & Flow, 2025.
Speaking

Talks, workshops, and consultation.

Speaker bio and photos

I speak and facilitate for universities, professional associations, school districts, foundations, and community organizations. Recent invitations include the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's National Loving Day Celebration, Morehouse College's Gaffney Lecture Series, and the Santa Barbara Unified School District's 2026–27 Leadership Institute. My talks cover belonging, healing, and mental health in Black, Multiracial, and other minoritized communities, and men's mental health and connection.

Current talks and workshops

  • Men, friendship, and being known: why many men with close friends still hold back what matters most to them, where opening up carries real risk, where the risk is smaller than it feels, and what helps. For campus wellness teams, counseling centers, and student audiences.
  • Reaching men who don't ask for support: why support often misses the men who need it, and how isolation affects whether it helps, drawing on research with Black men. It covers how to recognize isolation in busy lives and how to offer support men will take. For counseling centers, clinical teams, and campus men's programs.
  • Survivance and Sankofa as a model of radical healing: what sustains QTBIPOC clients and clinicians under prolonged structural stress, drawn from a national study of 815 activists. For clinical teams, training programs, and organizations thinking about how to sustain the people who do this work.
  • Racial homelessness and suicide risk among Multiracial clients: what it means when someone doesn't feel they belong to any racial community, and how to bring that into assessment and case conceptualization.
  • Beyond Single-Issue Learning: the multicultural classroom as its own form of teaching, and how to design training that trainees carry into practice. For faculty, training directors, and supervisors.
  • Building justice-aligned organizations: what it takes to build and sustain a healing-centered organization, from a training clinic to a school district, drawn from directing the Kindred Collective and its partnerships.
  • Leading for belonging: how leaders set norms for learning together, build practice tools, and respond to racialized harm with repair. Offered as a single workshop or a launch for a year-long partnership. For school districts, universities, and community organizations.
  • Racial stress and racial trauma in schools: how accumulated racial stress affects the mental and physical health of Black and Multiracial Black students, worked through case studies, including tensions between Black and Latiné students. For teachers, administrators, and school staff.

Wellness coaching

I'm also a wellness coach with The Black Girl Doctor, working one-on-one with college students through BGD's partnerships with universities across California. Students come in balancing coursework, jobs, family expectations, finances, and the pressure to perform, and coaching gives them a place to get clear on what matters to them and build routines that hold up under that load. Common starting points are managing a heavy workload without burning out, finding community on campus, advocating for themselves with advisors and professors, making decisions from their own values instead of outside pressure, and protecting sleep, energy, and time for joy. I hold particular care for Black students and other students of color, who often carry the added weight of being the only one in the room.

Coaching is forward-looking and goal-oriented, and it isn't therapy. When a student needs clinical care, I help them connect with campus counseling or with BGD's team of Black psychologists. Students can book a session through their campus's BGD partner page.

For talks, workshops, consultation, coaching, or media, write to ntkrueger@ucsb.edu.

Programs

The lab, the collective, and the clinic I direct at UCSB.

A long line of community members facing the ocean at sunset with arms outstretched, at Flourish & Flow on Goleta Beach.
Flourish & Flow: A Black Joy Beach Party, organized by the Kindred Collective at Goleta Beach, October 2025.
Research lab

The Wellness and Empowerment Initiative (WE-I)

WE-I is a Multiracial and Black-led research collective. Its work centers on radical healing, Survivance and Sankofa, and healing justice, and it partners with community programs on workshops, evaluations, dialogues, and practices developed together. With the Memphis Tenants Union, WE-I is building an Activist Health Playbook whose first users are the organizers who helped create it. Through the Community Harm Mapping process, developed with UCSB's Multicultural Center, it brings the Survivance and Sankofa framework to the work of naming institutional harm and supporting repair. In each partnership the partner helps set the direction and keeps what we build together.

Current team
  • Nolan T. Krueger, Ph.D.Director
  • Valencia LagboDoctoral Researcher
  • Miguel AranaDoctoral Researcher
  • Solana SegalDoctoral Researcher
  • Joseph EkpoPostbaccalaureate Researcher
  • Savannah MbamoPostbaccalaureate Researcher
  • Omari BowensUndergraduate Researcher
  • Nicole HudsonUndergraduate Researcher
Clinical training and community

The Kindred Collective for Healing and Liberatory Traditions

sbhealing.org

A clinical training and community collective at UCSB's Gevirtz School. Kindred runs two clinics inside UCSB's Hosford Clinic: Healing Space, a Black-centered clinic offering free or low-cost therapy to Black and African American residents of Santa Barbara County, and ALMA, a bilingual Spanish and English clinic grounded in curanderismo and liberation psychology. Clinicians are doctoral trainees supervised by licensed psychologists, and fees are based on income. Beyond the clinics, Kindred holds a year-long partnership with Santa Barbara Unified School District to strengthen belonging and well-being across the district, designed with Black and Multiracial Black students at the center. Kindred also created Flourish & Flow: A Black Joy Beach Party, a free community gathering at Goleta Beach in October 2025 that was recognized by Rep. Salud Carbajal, the California State Assembly and Senate, and the County of Santa Barbara.

Community members in Santa Barbara County can reach Kindred at education-kindred@ucsb.edu. Kindred is not a crisis service. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.

Current team
  • Nolan T. Krueger, Ph.D.Director
  • Malakai Coté, Ph.D.Training Director and Staff Clinician, Healing Space
  • Ariana Lozano, LMFTClinical Supervisor, ALMA
  • Jason Fly, Ph.D.Postdoctoral Fellow
  • Yvette Ramírez-Gutiérrez, M.A.Doctoral Clinician, ALMA
  • Solana SegalDoctoral Clinician, Healing Space
  • Valencia LagboDoctoral Clinician, Healing Space
  • Miguel AranaDoctoral Researcher
Research and prevention clinic

The Carol Ackerman Positive Psychology Clinic

ucsbpositivepsych.org

The sun setting over the Santa Barbara Channel with a gull in flight.

A research and prevention clinic in UCSB's Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology, founded in 2012 through a gift from Marshall Ackerman in memory of his wife, Carol. Under its current direction, the clinic is running a community needs assessment with people carrying sustained commitments, developing a prevention group that adapts Goal-Focused Positive Psychotherapy, which was created in this clinic, and building an undergraduate research team.

Current team
  • Nolan T. Krueger, Ph.D.Director
  • Shaun Minniti, M.A.Doctoral Coordinator
  • Ryan WatersPostbaccalaureate Researcher
  • Nyala Doty-NavarroUndergraduate Researcher
  • Lauren UptonUndergraduate Researcher
  • Rachel VallinUndergraduate Researcher
Writing

Selected publications and public scholarship.

Selected publications

The full list is on Google Scholar. My curriculum vitae is available as a PDF.

Public scholarship

  • Our True Colors: Mixed Race Voices and Other Stories of Belonging (2026). Guest on a special episode about the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association conference at UCLA, hosted by Shawna M. Gann.
  • Keynote, Fund for Santa Barbara Grantee Award Ceremony (2025). "Drops in the Waterfall: Liberation, Collective Care, and the Future of Healing Justice."
  • Journal of Black Psychology Podcast Series (2022). On race-related stress, racial identity, and social justice beliefs as predictors of African American activism.
  • The Conversation (2019), with Kevin Cokley and Marlon Bailey. Why LeBron James's I Promise School should be more like LeBron and not shy away from issues of race.
Nolan Krueger smiling at the coast in bright afternoon light.
Contact

The simplest way to reach me is email.

For talks, workshops, consultation, coaching, media, prospective students, or community partnerships.

ntkrueger@ucsb.edu
Office
Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology
Gevirtz School of Education
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Profiles
Google Scholar · Center for Black Studies Research · LinkedIn
Pronouns
he/him