Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. She earned her PhD in Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of Virginia and completed a Clinical and Community Psychology Residency at Yale University's School of Medicine and a Fellowship in Applied Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She uses mixed methods in clinical interventions to study racial discrimination and socialization in Black families to reduce racial stress and trauma and improve psychological well-being and family functioning.

She is interested in how these factors predict familial functioning and child psychosocial well-being and health-related behaviors when enrolled in family-based interventions. Dr. Anderson 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. Dr. Anderson’s work has garnered hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, National Institute of Health, Society for Research in Child Development, and the Michigan Health Endowment Foundation.

She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and contributed to a range of blogs, articles, and media, including features in The New York Times, The Times London, Huffington Post, Psychology Today, Women’s Health, WebMD, and NBC’s Newsroom. Dr. Anderson is involved nationally as an appointed member of the American Psychological Association’s Children, Youth, and Families committee and the Society for Research on Adolescence’s Anti-Racism Task Force. Dr. Anderson also serves as the co-host of Our Mental Health Minute, a vlog and podcast geared towards reducing stigma in the Black community. Finally, Dr. Anderson was born in, raised for, and returned to Detroit.