Shaun Sowell, PhD
she/hers, Associate Professor, Director, School Counseling Graduate Program
About
Dr. Shaun Sowell is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor Associate and Counselor Education faculty member. Dr. Sowell trains graduate students to become School and Clinical Mental Health Counselors and introduces undergraduate students to the helping professions. Her teaching and research focus is multicultural counseling, with an emphasis on power and privilege, consequences of structural racism (access to opportunity and mental health), social, historical, and political impacts on counseling outcomes, and training anti-racist and culturally competent counselors. Additionally, she loves to support students as they begin their journey towards and beyond graduation.
Prior to joining the faculty at Western, Dr. Sowell was a school counselor (k-12) and academic counselor (higher ed) who worked to identify, remove, challenge, and change policy within institutions which disproportionately affected students from current and historically under-resourced populations. She has over 10 years of experience in creating and implementing programs within k-12 schools and higher educational institutions to address inequities within these systems. As an Associate of the Center for Cross Cultural Research, Dr. Sowell is currently evaluating Western’s Counseling Training Clinic to identify the barriers to access mental health services for culturally and linguistically diverse community members. Other projects include: school counselors’ role in the prevention and intervention of sex-based harassment in schools; training of school counselors and the impact on professional counselor identity; relationships among school counselors’ perceptions of poverty, color-blind racial attitudes, and multicultural counseling knowledge and awareness; and, using single-subject data collection to enhance interventions being used in schools.
Outside of work, Dr. Sowell enjoys spending time with her family, specifically her two kiddos, Trajan and Joella and her husband, Brandon Joseph. She is a fan of sports and loves her Louisville Cardinals (go Cards!). She calls both Fairbanks, Alaska and Louisville, Kentucky "home".
Current Courses
PSY 564: Individual Counseling Techniques
PSY 670: School Counseling Internship