About Karen L. Suyemoto
Dr. Suyemoto is a licensed psychologist who provides diversity consultation, training, and mentoring both locally and nationally.
Everyday moments in our lives consist of choices that either compound the pain of injustice or contribute to individual and community healing and authenticity. In my work, I aim to foster the conscientization and empowerment that enables people to make more active and effective choices aligned with their goals and values. Making such conscious choices is particularly important for educators and human service professionals, where the positive or negative effects of daily choices are magnified through effects on service provision, teaching, organizational practices, and social policy. Through elucidating, fostering, and demonstrating the effects of empathy and agency, I hope to contribute in some small way to creating a better and more just world.
I am a multiracial, queer, Asian American woman. My journey has been shaped by my father’s Japanese American Nisei experience of unconstitutional incarceration in the U.S. during World War II as well as by my developmental experience of my mother’s major mental illness. My own positive and negative experiences in education and psychology graduate training also affected my path, particularly experiences related to mental health support or stigma from educators, moments of transformative education, experiences of racism and homophobia within the psychology field and training, and invisibilization and gaslighting as an Asian American queer woman.
Professionally, I am a licensed clinical psychologist with over 30 years of teaching, research, consultation, and training experience focused on issues of oppression, privilege, justice, and healing. See more in the Experience section below, or access my CV.
Experience
Academic Positions
Held tenured or tenure track positions since 1995 in varied college/university and department settings (i.e., wholly undergraduate public teaching college, wholly graduate department, primarily White institutions, and minority serving institutions).
Teaching experience
Taught over 20 different courses in clinical and counseling psychology, Asian American Studies, and Critical Ethnic and Community Studies. The majority of these courses were original and focused on issues of race, ethnicity, marginalization, and intersectional oppression and liberation. Recipient of the UMB Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues’s Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award, the Robert W. Goldberg Leadership in Education Award from Psychologists in Public Service, the Toy Caldwell-Colbert Award for Distinguished Educator in Clinical Psychology from the Society of Clinical Psychology, the inaugural Liem award for Outstanding Doctoral Mentoring, and the AAPA’s Distinguished Contributions Award. Fulbright Teaching Fellow.
Research experience
Published and co-authored four books and more than 60 articles and chapters focused on negotiating race and racism, developing and fostering conscientization and skills for resisting oppression, solidarity and intersectionality.
Consulting Experience
Program and Institutional Leadership
Contributed to the development of the scientist-practitioner-activist mission and activist praxis objectives of the UMB Clinical Psychology doctoral program, nationally recognized as a leader in psychology education for racial and ethnic minority students and issues; co-developed original Clinical Program diversity climate survey, diversity committee, Bridging Perspectives; first Director of the Critical Ethnic and Community Studies program; Board member and faculty development seminar facilitator for the Center for Innovative Teaching; Executive Committee member and Grievance Officer for the Faculty Staff Union; Co-Director of the New England Center for Inclusive Teaching.
Organizational and Disciplinary Leadership
Past President of the Asian American Psychological Association (AAPA), founder of the AAPA Early Career Leadership Fellows program; AAPA delegate to the American Psychological Association’s Council of Representatives (APA CoR); first Co-Chair of the AAPA Divsion on Women; founding member of the APA CoR Council Diversity Group; Chair of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Guidelines for Race and Ethnicity; member of APA President (Thema Bryant) Decolonial and Liberation Taskforce; mentor for the CNPAEMI Leadership Development Institute and the APA Minority Fellowship Program’s Psychology Summer Institute; recognized as a White House Champion of Change, Asian American Pacific Islander Women under the Obama administration