Back to Our Members
Riana Elyse Anderson

Riana Elyse Anderson, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
U-M Primary Appointment
Health Behavior &amp
Riana Elyse Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan's Public Health. She earned her PhD in Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of Virginia and completed a Clinical and Community Psychology Doctoral Internship at Yale University’s School of Medicine. She also completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Applied Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania supported by the Ford and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations. Before joining the University of Michigan, she was an Assistant Professor in Preventive Medicine and the Department of Children, Youth, and Families in the Social Work at the University of Southern California. Riana investigates how protective familial mechanisms such as parenting and racial socialization operate in the face of risks linked to discrimination and residential environment. She is particularly interested in how these factors predict familial functioning and subsequent child psychosocial well-being when youth are enrolled in family-based interventions. Riana is the developer and director of the EMBRace (Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race) intervention and loves to translate her work for a variety of audiences, particularly those whom she serves in the community, via blogs, video, and literary articles.