Nolan T. Krueger, Ph.D.
Portrait of Nolan T. Krueger, Ph.D., psychologist and UC Santa Barbara professor, outdoors in late afternoon light.

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 and professor 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. Over time the question widened into a broader one about what allows people to keep going under sustained pressure, 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 have their own lineages. Survivance is Gerald Vizenor's term, from Indigenous scholarship. Sankofa comes from the Akan tradition. Healing-centered engagement is Shawn Ginwright's, and the psychology of radical healing comes from Bryana French and her colleagues. My collaborators and I have argued that Survivance and Sankofa, a stance toward the present and a relationship to the past, have to be in place before healing work can hold, and that because this foundation has to be built, it can also be worn down. So I treat burnout as a structural condition rather than a personal failing, and my work with organizations and school districts starts with the adults.

I also 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

Current lines of research.

Most of this work sits within the Wellness and Empowerment Initiative for Multiracial and BIPOC Communities (WE-I), the lab I direct at UCSB. Across these projects I look at the conditions around people, more than individual traits, to understand what supports well-being and what wears it down.

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 keeps people in justice work and what drives them out. The study looks at how distress, commitment, hope, and collective coping sit together in activists' lives, and at the part community plays, including whether people believe the groups they belong to can act together and change anything. With the Memphis Tenants Union, WE-I is using the study to build an Activist Health Playbook for organizers. 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 started with my dissertation on racial homelessness, the experience of not belonging to any racial community, and what it means for suicide risk and for how clinicians assess it. 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. Supported by the Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship.

Training

Beyond Single-Issue Learning

A framework for counseling psychology training built on the idea that how a course is held teaches as much as what it covers: its rituals, its physical spaces, the relationships in the room, and its movement between the university and community settings. Critical consciousness has to be formed rather than delivered, and whether it lasts depends on the ecology of training more than the curriculum. I've taught the course built on it three times in UCSB's doctoral program, and a longitudinal study with the University of Denver follows the same trainees from the end of the course into clinical practice to see what stays with them.

Higher education

Defunded DEI and academic pathways

An interview study of how the defunding of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, programs, and positions is affecting the academic pathways of faculty and students of color. Interviews with faculty and students are underway.

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 a national study of 815 activists. For clinical teams, training programs, and organizations thinking about how to sustain the people who do this work.
  • Racial homelessness and suicide risk among Multiracial clients: what it means when someone doesn't feel they belong to any racial community, and how to bring that into assessment and case conceptualization.
  • Beyond Single-Issue Learning: the multicultural classroom as its own form of teaching, and how to design training that trainees carry into practice. For faculty, training directors, and supervisors.
  • 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.

Wellness coaching

I'm also a wellness coach with The Black Girl Doctor, working one-on-one with college students through BGD's partnerships with universities across California. Students come in balancing coursework, jobs, family expectations, finances, and the pressure to perform, and coaching gives them a place to get clear on what matters to them and build routines that hold up under that load. Common starting points are managing a heavy workload without burning out, finding community on campus, advocating for themselves with advisors and professors, making decisions from their own values instead of outside pressure, and protecting sleep, energy, and time for joy. I hold particular care for Black students and other students of color, who often carry the added weight of being the only one in the room.

Coaching is forward-looking and goal-oriented, and it isn't therapy. When a student needs clinical care, I help them connect with campus counseling or with BGD's team of Black psychologists. Students can book a session through their campus's BGD partner page.

For talks, workshops, consultation, coaching, 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)

WE-I is a Multiracial and Black-led research collective. Its work centers on radical healing, Survivance and Sankofa, and healing justice, and it partners with community programs on workshops, evaluations, dialogues, and practices developed together. With the Memphis Tenants Union, WE-I is building an Activist Health Playbook whose first users are the organizers who helped create it. Through the Community Harm Mapping process, developed with UCSB's Multicultural Center, it brings the Survivance and Sankofa framework to the work of naming institutional harm and supporting repair. In each partnership the partner helps set the direction and keeps what we build together.

Current team
  • Nolan T. Krueger, Ph.D.Director
  • Valencia LagboDoctoral Researcher
  • Miguel AranaDoctoral Researcher
  • Solana SegalDoctoral Researcher
  • Joseph EkpoPostbaccalaureate Researcher
  • Savannah MbamoPostbaccalaureate Researcher
  • Omari BowensUndergraduate Researcher
  • Nicole HudsonUndergraduate Researcher
Clinical training and community

The Kindred Collective for Healing and Liberatory Traditions

sbhealing.org

A clinical training and community collective at UCSB's Gevirtz School. 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.

Current team
  • Nolan T. Krueger, Ph.D.Director
  • Malakai Coté, Ph.D.Training Director and Staff Clinician, Healing Space
  • Ariana Lozano, LMFTClinical Supervisor, ALMA
  • Jason Fly, Ph.D.Postdoctoral Fellow
  • Yvette Ramírez-Gutiérrez, M.A.Doctoral Clinician, ALMA
  • Solana SegalDoctoral Clinician, Healing Space
  • Valencia LagboDoctoral Clinician, Healing Space
  • Miguel AranaDoctoral Researcher
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. Under its current direction, the clinic is running a community needs assessment with people carrying sustained commitments, developing a prevention group that adapts Goal-Focused Positive Psychotherapy, which was created in this clinic, and building an undergraduate research team.

Current team
  • Nolan T. Krueger, Ph.D.Director
  • Shaun Minniti, M.A.Doctoral Coordinator
  • Ryan WatersPostbaccalaureate Researcher
  • Nyala Doty-NavarroUndergraduate Researcher
  • Lauren UptonUndergraduate Researcher
  • Rachel VallinUndergraduate Researcher
Writing

Selected publications and public scholarship.

Selected publications

The full list is on Google Scholar.

Public scholarship

  • Our True Colors: Mixed Race Voices and Other Stories of Belonging (2026). Guest 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, coaching, 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