Nahreen Aref began working with refugees after her junior year of undergrad, while she was home for the summer in North Tustin. She couldn't help but see the similarities to her own parents, who fled Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1979 amid the Soviet invasion.

"The only reason that they were able to escape at the time that they did was because they came from a higher socioeconomic background," she says. "I think I understood that there was nothing that separated me from being in this situation besides the fact that my parents had money when they left. And I think with that comes a sense of responsibility. That could have very easily been me, if I was born to another family."

After completing her bachelor's degree in political science at UC Berkeley, Aref moved to Madrid, where she spent a year teaching English at an elementary school then got a master's degree in middle eastern studies. While living in Europe, she continued her work with refugees, volunteering at camps in Greece during the summers.

"My experiences working there made me really interested in the manifestations of violence as an outcome of policy," she says. "Different sorts of policies and the environments that they breed can put seemingly good people in positions in which violence becomes an outcome, and I really wanted to analyze that."

Now 28 years old, Aref chose to return to Orange County, where she was born and raised, to pursue a Ph.D. in political science, and not just because she could live with her family. "UCI was a really, really good option, as far as it being a really top rated school," she says. 

Over the course of her graduate studies, her lens has changed. "I started to move away from wanting to explain the specific predictors of violence," she said. Instead, she decided to center her dissertation on resilience and the role of mental-health services in international aid. She's investigating how institutional, political, and discursive barriers to resilience-building lead to gaps when it comes to prioritizing psychosocial support for refugees.

"'Resilience' has become this buzz word in the field of international aid," she said. "A lot of projects for refugee aid have the goal of 'resilience-building.'"

The perfect case study was the 6 billion euros that the E.U. pledged to Turkey in 2016 to aid with the Syrian refugee crisis, the most highly funded externalization policy in history. Since those funds ran out, the E.U. committed an additional 3.5 billion euros there. "Resource wise, this is the biggest investment in humanitarian and development aid for externalization," says Aref.

As part of her research, Aref has been interviewing E.U. policymakers, U.N. officials, and international organizations. But she's not ending things there. She's also talking to mental-health officers who work directly with refugees on the ground. For Aref, a crucial part of creating better policy is examining the intersection of international relations and psychology. "So much of our debate around international relations doesn't really grapple with the fact that when we're discussing policies, these policies are meant for people," she says. "Knowledge about individual and social psychology would be really, really useful for the development of effective policy."

When Aref found herself drawn toward the psychological aspects of the refugee experience, she decided to pursue a concurrent master's degree in counseling psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, which she completed this spring. "There are a lot of ethical dilemmas with doing this kind of work," she says. "It's most responsible to be going to those spaces with a clinical mental health background, so you're not re-traumatizing already traumatized people."

One of Aref's advisors, UCI political science professor Cecelia Lynch, applauds her for obtaining a clinical degree in addition to the theoretical work she's undertaken. "She will be able to tell us much better how to prioritize and address the mental health of displaced people," says Lynch. "I am confident that practitioners as well as scholars will learn an enormous amount from her research."

In the past, Aref worried that her approach was a limitation. "I think a little bit less on a theoretical level than some of my colleagues," she admits. "I've always thought from a very applied space." These days, however, she's come to see it as a strength. A Ph.D. isn't just about developing hyper-specialized knowledge, she says: Doctors of philosophy have a responsibility to apply that knowledge beyond the academic sphere.

Currently in the sixth and final year of her Ph.D. program, Aref has myriad options to consider for the future: a postdoc position, therapy work as she completes hours for licensure, or even consulting. "One thing I've been thinking about recently is consulting for an international organization in mental health and psychosocial support," she says. "Basically, how to apply knowledge about mental health and psychosocial support to a variety of different aid sectors so that they could be more psychologically informed."

Until then, she's relishing the things she loves about Irvine: swimming in the ocean, bellydancing, the atmosphere at school. "There is this kind of energetic quality that develops sometimes when I'm on campus, after I've had a really good discussion section, or have led a lecture, or had a really nice meeting in which I feel super intellectually stimulated. Everything in my body just feels very balanced and happy," she says. "UCI has provided this really comfortable space in which I get to have that."

—Alison Van Houten for UCI Social Sciences