Professional Staff
Àdísà Àjàmú, Director
Àdísà Àjàmú is the founding Director of the Center for Black Cultures, Resources and Research (CBCRR), which was established in 2016. As a developmental psychologist and social justice activist his research, service, and activism focus primarily in the areas of behavior change, community health, trauma and healing, culture, spirituality, and the knowledge construction with a special emphasis on the social, ethnic, and cultural relativity of social science. His work in the area of community health has taken him to over thirty countries in Africa and seven countries in Latin America. He is the co-author two influential books on Black Psychology: The Psychology of Blacks: An African Centered Perspective (1999) and The Psychology of Blacks: Centering our perspectives in the African consciousness (2010), which he co-authored with Drs. Thomas Parham and Joseph White. He has been a contributing author to a number of the seminal intellectual projects among them, the ASCAC World History Project, Black Psychology, edited by Reginald Jones, and most recently, the Encyclopedia of Clinical and Community Psychology. He has published numerous scholarly essays, articles, book reviews, and book chapters on African and Afri-diasporan life and culture. He is the founder of the Student Circle of Association of Black Psychologists and a former National Chairperson as well as the founding editor of Àsé (Ah-Shay), the online blog for the International Association of Black Psychologists.
Love, Study, Struggle,
àdísà (Ah-Dee-Sah)
Niobe Duke, Program Coordinator
Niobe Duke is an alumnus of UCI, Class of 2018 within a B.A. Economics. Among her many roles as a student leader on campus she has served in the following capacities: Special Assistant for Financial Affairs at the Center for Black Cultures, Resources and Research at UC Irvine; Outreach Student Coordinator for SOAR at UC Irvine; and IRISE Student Coordinator at UC Irvine. Within these leadership roles, she was able to focus on underserved underrepresented, first-year, and first-generation students by designing, developing, and implementing educational programs and events. Her role encompassed program planning while serving as a liaison and resource for Black student organizations and other centers on campus. Niobe worked closely with student organizations and taught seminars that promoted leadership training, but also supported student-initiated outreach projects, fostering leadership development and empowerment, and addressed educational access needs of underrepresented and underserved students. Niobe’s goal is to strengthen the Black community on the campus and brings a breadth and depth of student service and student programming experience to her role as program coordinator for the center.
She is the Vice-President of the Black Faculty and Staff Association at UC Irvine developing programs and events to establish a consistent, positive and respectful rapport with the Black community on campus.
Niobe is also a member of the most illustrious sorority in the world ~~ Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.