Faculty Members Active in Asian American Psychological Association
Wright Institute faculty members Alicia del Prado, PhD and Ulash Thakore-Dunlap, MFT hold leadership roles within the Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA), a national organization dedicated to Asian American psychology and mental health issues and training and education of Asian American mental health professionals.
In 2016, del Prado, a faculty member in the Wright Institute’s Clinical Psychology (Psy.D.) program, co-founded the AAPA division on Asian Americans with Multiple Heritages. Recently, she was elected chair of the division’s inaugural committee.
“The division was created to bring awareness to Asian Americans who are multiracial, multi-ethnic, people who are in multiracial families and transnational adoptees,” del Prado explains. “Within the United States, as well as in the Asian American community, mono-racial experiences are very privileged, so unfortunately people who are multiracial can be rejected by their own family members and experience other forms of discrimination.”
Inspired by Kevin Nadal, PhD, the first-ever openly gay president of the AAPA, del Prado—who identifies as Filipino and Italian-American—acted on her own longtime mission to further open the organization to members of the community who had long felt like they didn’t have a place.
“One of Kevin [Nadal’s] presidential messages was to raise awareness of intersecting groups within the Asian American community,” del Prado says, adding that the division’s first meetings attracted not only multiracial members of the Asian American community, but also people who were in multiracial relationships who were thinking about the lives of their children and future children. “We support research and advocacy in this community, as well as develop databases of therapists to whom we can refer patients. I am really excited to see how the division continues to develop and grow.”
Ulash Thakore-Dunlap, a full-time faculty member in the Wright Institute’s Counseling Psychology program, is a board member for the AAPA and chair-elect for the organization’s Division on Practice. This AAPA subset provides a forum for Asian American psychologists who are particularly interested in bridging the gap between research and practice in the application of mental health services to the Asian American and Pacific Islanders community.
Thakore-Dunlap recently spoke at the annual AAPA convention in Las Vegas. One presentation, entitled “Disseminating Best Practices on Bullying Prevention and Intervention to AAPI Parents and School Professionals,” expounded upon an initiative she and a few colleagues have spearheaded devising resources about bullying for parents in the Asian American and Pacific Islanders community.
“As we looked at the statistics, we saw that a lot of bullying that happens within the Asian American community is under-reported, and there are not enough culturally-specific materials available,” Thakore-Dunlap says. “We have already had our pamphlets translated into Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese, and if we earn more funding we will translate it into more languages."
Read more about Ulash Thakore-Dunlap here.
Read Dr. del Prado's biography here.
Read more about the AAPA’s Bullying Awareness Campaign here.
Read more about the AAPA’s division on Asian Americans with Multiple Heritages here.
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Click here to learn more about the Wright Institute’s Master of Counseling Psychology program.