Nolan T. Krueger

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

I study what sustains people who do demanding work under structural pressure, and what wears them down. Most of my research follows three lines: the well-being of QTBIPOC activists, belonging and suicide risk among Multiracial young people, and whether justice-oriented training survives once trainees enter practice. 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 Kindred Collective Positive Psychology Clinic

About

Psychologist, professor, and director of three programs at UC Santa Barbara.

I'm a licensed psychologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology at UC Santa Barbara's Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, where I've been on the faculty since 2023. 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 hold an affiliate appointment with UCSB's Center for Black Studies Research.

My research started with a question about belonging: as a doctoral student I studied racial homelessness, the experience of not belonging to any racial community, as a risk factor for suicidal ideation among Multiracial young adults. The Ford Foundation funded that work, and the first paper from it is now in press. Over time the question widened into a broader one about what allows people to keep going within conditions that wear them down, which is where the activist well-being research, the Kindred Collective's community programming, and the Positive Psychology Clinic's new direction all come from.

The frameworks I work from came from other people, and the credit belongs with them. Survivance is Gerald Vizenor's, from Indigenous scholarship. Sankofa belongs to the Akan tradition. Healing-centered engagement is Shawn Ginwright's, and the psychology of radical healing comes from Bryana French and her colleagues. What my collaborators and I have added is an argument about order: the stance and the memory have to be in place before a relationship can hold what healing brings up, and a foundation that has to be built can also be eroded. That last point is why I treat burnout as a structural condition rather than a failure of individual resilience, and why the work I do with organizations and school districts starts with the adults.

Beyond UCSB, I 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

What sustains people under structural pressure, and what wears them down.

Most of this work sits within the Wellness and Empowerment Initiative for Multiracial and BIPOC Communities (WE-I), the lab I direct at UCSB. What connects these projects is attention to the conditions that produce or erode well-being, rather than to individual traits on their own.

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 sustains people who do justice work and what wears them down. Across every analysis, psychological distress was the strongest predictor of reduced well-being, and individual capacity in the form of resilience, hope, and collective coping was the most robust positive predictor. Among collective factors, the felt sense that one's community can act together and produce real change mattered most. Commitment to activism and distress coexisted, so being committed did not protect against distress and being distressed did not undermine commitment. Two manuscripts from the study are under review, and a practical Activist Health Playbook for organizers is in development, with a community-engaged partnership with the Memphis Tenants Union as its first site. 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 began with my dissertation and continues in a paper now in press at Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, which found that racial homelessness predicted suicidal ideation among Multiracial young adults above and beyond depressive symptoms, hopelessness, perceived burdensomeness, and the general sense of thwarted belonging that standard suicide-risk models rely on. The clinical implication is that racial belonging may need to be assessed as its own domain. 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. Findings return to community before they go anywhere academic. Supported by the Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship.

Training

Beyond Single-Issue Learning

A framework for counseling psychology training that treats the classroom itself, its rituals, its physical environment, its relational holding, and its movement between institutional and community-grounded spaces, as the mechanism of teaching, rather than the content covered. The premise is that critical consciousness has to be formed rather than delivered, and that whether it survives training depends on ecology more than curriculum. I've taught the course built on it three times in UCSB's doctoral program, and a longitudinal interpretative phenomenological study, in partnership with the University of Denver, follows the same trainees from the end of the course into clinical practice to see which parts of that learning last.

Higher education

Defunded DEI and academic pathways

A study of what happens to faculty and students of color when the diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, programs, and positions that supported their academic pathways are defunded or dismantled. The project is led by WE-I researcher Joseph Ekpo, with Jill Sharkey and the WE-I team, and received IRB approval in May 2026. It follows the same question that runs through the rest of this work: what happens to people's well-being when the conditions that sustained them are taken away.

Also underway

A collaborative autoethnography of Black men in counseling psychology, and 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.

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, where I designed and led the opening session of a year-long leadership partnership.

Current talks and workshops

Survivance and Sankofa as a model of radical healing. What sustains QTBIPOC clients and clinicians under prolonged structural stress, drawn from the national study of 815 activists. Healing has preconditions, distress erodes that foundation at least as readily as commitment builds it, and burnout is a structural condition. Speaks to clinician sustainability as directly as to client care.
Racial homelessness and suicide risk among Multiracial clients. Not belonging to any racial community predicts suicidal ideation beyond depressive symptoms, hopelessness, perceived burdensomeness, and thwarted belongingness, with implications for assessment and case conceptualization.
Beyond Single-Issue Learning. The multicultural classroom as the mechanism of teaching: its rituals, its embodiment, its physical environment, and its movement between institutional and community-grounded spaces. Critical consciousness has to be formed rather than delivered, and whether it survives depends on ecology more than curriculum.
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.

For talks, workshops, consultation, 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)

As a Multiracial and Black-led collective, WE-I does work focused on radical healing, Survivance and Sankofa, healing justice, and healing-centered engagement, partnering with healing-centered community programs and facilitating workshops, event evaluations, dialogues, and co-created liberatory practices with local and national partners. Reciprocity in these partnerships is concrete. With the Memphis Tenants Union, WE-I is building an Activist Health Playbook whose first site is the community itself, a tool designed to be usable by the people who helped create it. Through the Community Harm Mapping process, developed with the Multicultural Center at UCSB, WE-I brings its Survivance and Sankofa framework to the work of naming institutional harm and supporting repair. In each partnership, the partner helps set the direction, and the first usable products belong to the community that made them possible.

Clinical training and community

The Kindred Collective for Healing and Liberatory Traditions

sbhealing.org

A clinical training and community-engaged collective at UCSB's Gevirtz School that I have directed since July 2026. 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.

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. I became its director in July 2026. The clinic has existed for over a decade, and its current direction is a few months old: a community needs assessment with people carrying sustained commitments, a prevention group in development that adapts Goal-Focused Positive Psychotherapy, which was developed in this clinic, and an undergraduate research team that is helping to build the lab rather than joining one.

Writing

Selected publications and public scholarship.

Selected publications

Krueger, N. T., & Arana, M. A. (in press). Beyond belonging: Racial homelessness as a culturally specific risk factor for suicidal ideation in Multiracial young adults. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology.
Harris, M., Krueger, N. T., Beauliere, G. I., Randolph Cunningham, S., & Hall, A. (2026). When being alone matters: How perceived isolation shapes the impact of support on Black men's mental health. Journal of Black Psychology, Special Issue: Black Men and Mental Health.
Krueger, N. T., Segal, S., & Gomez, M. (in press). In between and becoming: Monoracism, mental health, and resilience among Multiracial American emerging adults. In A. Nishina, S. E. Gaither, & L. Kiang (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multiracial Youth and Families. Cambridge University Press.
Shodiya, S., Baker, B. A., Robinson, D., Cerezo, A., & Krueger, N. T. (2025). An ecowomanist analysis of politicized environmental identity formation and environmental activism among Black women in the United States. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 49(4), 475-490.
Cokley, K., Krueger, N. T., Garba, R., Bailey, M., Harris, K., Hall, S., Coleman, C., & Archer, J. (2022). Lawyering while Black: Perceived stress as a mediator of impostor feelings, race-related stress, and mental health among Black attorneys. Journal of Black Psychology, 48(2), 206-232.
Krueger, N. T., Garba, R., Stone-Sabali, S., Cokley, K., & Bailey, M. (2021). African American activism: The predictive role of race related stress, racial identity, and social justice beliefs. Journal of Black Psychology, 48(3-4), 273-308.
Cokley, K., Krueger, N. T., Cunningham, S. R., Burlew, K., Hall, S., Harris, K., Castelin, S., & Coleman, C. (2021). The COVID-19/racial injustice syndemic and mental health among Black Americans. Journal of Community Psychology, 50(6), 2542-2561.
Stone, S., Saucer, C., Bailey, M., Garba, R., Hurst, A., Jackson, S. M., Krueger, N. T., & Cokley, K. (2018). Learning while Black: A culturally informed model of the impostor phenomenon for Black graduate students. Journal of Black Psychology, 44(6), 491-531.

Two manuscripts from the activist well-being study, one theoretical and one empirical, are under review. The full list is on Google Scholar.

Public scholarship

Our True Colors: Mixed Race Voices and Other Stories of Belonging (2026). Featured voice 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, media, prospective students, or community partnerships.

ntkrueger@ucsb.edu

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