Em Matsuno, Ph.D.

Pronouns: They/Them

Dr. Matsuno is the inaugural CLEAR Goldblum-Carr Postdoctoral Fellow, working under the mentorship of Dr. Kimberly Balsam. They graduated in 2019 with a PhD in counseling psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and completed their pre-doctoral internship at UPenn’s counseling and psychological services. Em’s research goals are two-fold: 1) to understand the minority stressors and resilience factors that transgender and non-binary people (TNB) experience and 2) to develop and test interventions to reduce minority stressors and/or increase resilience factors for TNB people. For their dissertation, Em developed and pilot tested an online intervention to increase supportive behaviors among parents of transgender youth and received the Roy Scrivner grant from the American Psychological Foundation to conduct a larger efficacy study of the intervention. Em is excited about starting new research projects at PAU including developing a measure of minority stress and resilience among non-binary people. Em has supported trans communities through their contributions to the APAGS committee on sexual orientation and gender diversity, Division 44 committees for transgender people and gender diversity and children, youth, and families. They previously acted as chair of the Division 35 Sec IV graduate student committee and are currently co-chairing a special task group in Division 17 to create a pipeline for TNB people into counseling psychology. Based on their advocacy and research supporting trans populations, Em received the award for Outstanding Graduate Student from Division 17 in 2018 and the Distinguished Student Contribution Award from Division 44 in 2019.