Miray is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Educational Psychology: Applied Developmental Science in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. Currently, she is a Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) dissertation fellow and a former Institute of Educations Sciences (IES) pre-doctoral fellow. Prior to beginning graduate school, Miray spent a year working as a project coordinator in Motivate Lab, and two years as a lab manager in the Language Development Lab and Wilbourn Infant Lab at Duke University (WILD). She received my B.A. Psychology and a certificate in Human development from Duke University.
Miray’s research focuses on three key areas: (1) factors promoting the holistic development of student athletes, (2) the educational experiences of Black women and, (3) how middle school students learn and talk about race. Her manuscript-style, three-paper dissertation employed qualitative and quantitative methods to interrogate the educational experiences of Division I Black women college athletes. In each dissertation manuscript, she explored how various environmental risk and protective factors support and challenge the impact of Black women student athletes’ coping methods, identities and outcomes.