“How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own? How can I dialogue if I am closed to - and even offended by - the contribution of others? At the point of encounter there are neither yet ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only people who are attempting, together, to learn more than they now know.”

~Paulo Freire

Riana Elyse Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. She earned her Ph.D. in Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of Virginia and completed a Clinical and Community Psychology Doctoral Internship at Yale University's School of Medicine. She also completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Applied Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Anderson uses mixed methods to study discrimination and racial socialization in Black families and apply her findings to help families reduce racial stress and heal from racial trauma. She is particularly interested in how family-based interventions help to improve Black youth’s psychosocial well-being and health-related behaviors. Dr. Anderson is the developer and director of the EMBRace (Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race) intervention and loves to translate her work for a variety of audiences, particularly those whom she serves in the community, via blogs, video, and literary articles.

Finally, Dr. Anderson was born in, raised for, and returned to Detroit and is becoming increasingly addicted to cake pops.

Born and raised in Ypsilanti, MI, Michael graduated from the University of Michigan in 2012 where he studied Business and Spanish. After a summer internship with Google, he returned full-time and has spent the past 8 years on 8 sales teams helping businesses of all shapes and sizes to profitably grow. He now manages a Small Business Sales team. Michael has also made significant contributions to Google's diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. He has brought digital resources to hundreds of minority-owned businesses by managing various community partnerships, has worked to make Google Ann Arbor the most inclusive office in the world as co-lead of an Employee Resource Group, and is now coaching hundreds of Googlers of color through a development program he founded and scaled. He was even recognized in a Fortune magazine cover story for some of his efforts. Outside of work, Michael spends a lot of time in movie theaters, owns two chinchillas, and enjoys sharing his 2-year old son, Jack, with the world through Instagram (@gardenofmichael), one dad joke at a time.