Micere Keels

Micere Keels research focuses on understanding how race-ethnicity and poverty structure the supports and challenges that children and youth experience. She is particularly interested in how family and neighborhood inequality are associated with the sorting of children into different quality schools, and the interventions that can improve their educational outcomes. She is currently leading three projects that work to improve the educational experiences and outcomes of students from historically marginalized communities.

Assoc. Prof. Keels is the founding director of the Trauma Responsive Educational Practices (TREP) Project, which is a research-translation and research-practice-partnership that aims to connect the brain and behavior research on developmental trauma with the realities of school and classroom management. The project is aimed at developing educator capacity for serving children growing up in areas where poverty, housing instability, crime, and violence rates are unacceptably high. The program is a natural evolution of her years of research on issues of race, poverty, and inequality within the context of neighborhoods, schools and families.