About Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards, Ph.D. (She/Her)

I am an interdisciplinary scholar and developmental psychologist who studies how racism, gender, and culture shape development across the lifespan, with a focus on African Americans. A central thread in my work is resilience: how cultural strengths and systemic change help families, communities, and schools withstand racial stress and navigate difficult social contexts.

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I am an Associate Professor of General Internal Medicine and Associate Director of Research at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. I currently chair the Black Caucus of the Society for Research in Child Development.

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My PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development is from the University of Pennsylvania, where I trained in culturally informed methodology and theory, the study of racial stress, racial socialization, and gender. That training built on a foundation from my M.A. in Developmental Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, and my B.S. in Psychology from Howard University, where my interest in resilience first took shape.

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My research has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. I bring this work into public conversation regularly, through interviews and commentary with outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Guardian, and TIME, as well as a TEDx talk at Duke, and I have authored op-eds connecting research to current events.

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Across all of this work, my goal remains the same: to move beyond documenting what harms African American communities and toward building the conditions in which they thrive. My job is to help systems finally catch up to the strength these communities have always had.