Research & Scholarship

Broadly, my professional scholarship seeks to bring visibility and voice to the subtle biases underprivileged people and communities experience. By making these “invisible” biases more visible, my work makes it possible for prevention and intervention policies and programs to reduce their harm to underprivileged people and communities. The public often condemns psychology researchers who focus exclusively on conducting and publishing research only in for-pay journals (i.e., traditional peer-reviewed journals), labeling it toxic gatekeeping. My professional work pays careful attention to avoiding this gatekeeping, ensuring equal access by engaging intentionally in the application and dissemination of my research findings as part of my professional growth.

My work has informed and has been cited in national psychology training and practice guidelines on understanding the impact of immigration (Suarez-Orozco et al., 2011) and race/ethnicity (Suyemoto et al., 2019) on mental health outcomes. The SDSU Senate Faculty Honors and Awards Committee recognized my work with the 2021 Faculty Diversity Excellence Award for “exemplary commitment to diversity, inclusion, and social justice.” Nationally, the Society of Community Research and Action (Division 27, APA) honored my contributions by naming me a fellow. I was also awarded the Council of National Associations for the Advancement of Ethnic Minority Interest’s 2019 Henry Tomes Award for Exceptional Contributions of an Emerging Leader in Ethnic Minority Psychology, which “honors the work of a psychologist whose work has already influenced and demonstrated promise for distinguished contributions towards the empowerment of ethnic minority individuals and communities.” Further, my work has been featured and quoted in a wide range of outlets, from public radio shows, KPBS news, the San Diego Union Tribune, the CSU Chancellor’s Office website, and Teen Vogue, and I have been invited to speak at The White House on the state of Asian American and Pacific Islander health equity.

Assessing and Exposing Subtle Gender Biases in Academia. One line of my research sheds light on the experiences of women traditionally marginalized in academia, with particular attention to women in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. In 2013, I procured a $750,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE grant as the principal investigator. The NSF ADVANCE program aims to support women's recruitment, retention, and advancement in STEM academics. In 2020, I published the Perceived Subtle Gender Biases Index (PSGBI; Tran et al., 2020; Impact Factor: 4.292; Professional Growth Item 1), which assesses the extent to which academic women across disciplines have been exposed to subtle gender biases in the workplace. The PSGBI is the first measure that allows documentation of the perceived subtle gender biases academic women experience. This article is a collaboration among 14 coauthors from four institutions across the country, representing over 10 disciplines. In 2017, I extended this line of scholarship to include SDSU collaborators from Psychology, Education, Biology, and Faculty Advancement to further build my NSF ADVANCE work. The PSGBI is the first measure that allows for the documentation of perceived subtle gender biases that academic women experience. This work has led to presentations at the Association for Women in the Sciences Conference and is currently being used to assess the campus climate at UMass-Lowell.

Understanding Impact of War Trauma on the Refugee Adaptation. My perspective and influence on psychology over the last 2 decades, particularly Asian American psychology, bring together my lifetime of experiential and historical knowledge as the daughter of Vietnamese refugee “boat people” and my professional training as a community and prevention psychologist. My scholarship seeks to bring visibility to the experiences of Asian Americans, specifically their experiences of discrimination (Tran & Birman, 2010) and the complicated interracial relationships of Asian American ethnic groups with one another (French et al., 2013) and with other racial minority groups (Tran et al., 2018). My work also expands the field’s understanding of who is included by pushing the definition of inclusion to spotlight those who continue to be excluded. For example, my coeditors and I published a special issue in the Asian American Journal of Psychology (Kim et al., 2021) that brought together a collection of articles that pushed the boundaries of who is considered Asian American and what is considered social justice for the Asian American diaspora. This visibility extends beyond scholarship in psychology and seeks to impact U.S. government policy (e.g., congressional testimony, Saw & Tran, 2021; White House panelist speaking on health equities among Asian/Pacific Islander Americans, Tran, 2022), medical providers (Tran et al., 2021), and international migration work (Tran, 2022).

Bringing Liberation Psychology to the Mainstream. My approach to bringing visibility to subtle bias as a first step toward creating social change includes a focus on identifying internalized oppression, which occurs when people work to support the system that continues to oppress them. For example, hierarchical systems can only exist when people at all levels of the hierarchy participate in maintaining the system. For people on the bottom of the hierarchy, to enforce the system, they sometimes come to believe in the messages (i.e., stereotypes and biases) holding them back. This happens through general socialization (e.g., Tran & Paterson, 2015) and school socialization (e.g., Tran & Birman, 2017).

To bring visibility to the ways individuals come to have internalized oppression, I wrote abusive uses of concepts such as empowerment (Tran, 2023), imposter syndrome (Tran, 2023), and self-care (Miller & Tran, in press). I also used critical autoethnographic research methodologies to share an example of how these three concepts integrated and operated during my time as the principal investigator of an NSF ADVANCE grant project (Tran, 2020). These manuscripts describe oppressive conditions and messages embedded within academic and workplace settings. This work also represents the theoretical framework for the mentorship I do nationally, which has garnered awards, including the Society for Community Research and Action’s Ethnic Minority Mentorship Award (2017) and interviews withThe APA Monitoron effective mentorship for people of color (Palmer, 2019).

Representative Publications

[Please email me for access to articles you might not be able to locate.]

Tran, N. (2023). From imposter phenomenon to infiltrator experience: Decolonizing the mind to claim space and reclaim self. Submitted to Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology. 29(2), 184–193. https://doi.org/10.1037/pac0000674

Tran, N. (2023). Community Psychology’s abuse of empowerment to further a White Supremacist Agenda. American Journal of Community Psychology, x(xx). https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12676

Tran, N., Yabes, K. & Miller, A. (2021). How should clinicians help patients navigate “model minority” demands? American Medical Association Journal of Ethics. 23(6), 456-464. doi: 10.1001/amajethics.2021.456

Tran, N. (2020). In name only: A principal investigator’s struggle for authority. In G. Gutiérrez y Muhs, Y. F. Niemann, C. G. González, & A. P. Harris, A. (Eds) Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia. (pp. 245-255). Utah State University Press. doi: ro.7330/978 1607329664 ,co23

Tran, N., Hayes, R. B., Ho., I. K., Crawford, S. L., Chen, J., Ockene, J. K. … & Pbert, L. (2019). Perceived Subtle Gender Bias Index: Development and validation for use in academia. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 43, 509-529. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684319877199

Tran, N., Nakamura, N., Kim, G. S., Khera, G. S., & AnhAllen, J. M. (2018). #APIsforBlackLives: Unpacking the interracial discourse on the Asian American Pacific Islander and Black communities. Community Psychology in Global Perspective, 4(2), 73-84. http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/cpgp/article/download/18707/16417 

Tran, N., & Birman (2017). Acculturation and assimilation: A qualitative inquiry of teacher expectations for Somali Bantu refugee students. Education & Urban Society, 51(5), 712-736. doi:  10.1177/0013124517747033

Tran, N., & Birman, D. (2010). Questioning the model minority: Studies of Asian American academic performance. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 1, 106-118. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019965