Dr. Laura Uba
Laura Uba (seated) with AAS faculty, Alan Aquino (back), Gina Masequesmay (left to right), Edith Chen, Maria Turnmeyer and Juana Mora, Chicano Studies. (Photo: Ryan Purugganan)
"Asian American Studies is important because it helps Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans understand (1) how being AA relates to who an AA is and (2) what typically overlooked aspects of America tell us about the United States."
Dr. Uba received her B.A. from UCLA with a major in sociology and psychology and her PhD in psychology from the University of Colorado. Upon receiving her Ph.D., she had a postdoctoral fellowship at the Vanderbilt Institute of Public Policy and at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.
A member of the committee to establish the Asian American Studies Department at CSUN, her research focuses on psychology and Asian Americans.
She is the author of the book, Asian Americans: Personality Patterns, Identity, and Mental Health. She has also written the first multicultural introductory psychology textbook, published in August of 1998.
Her latest book is A Postmodern Psychology of Asian Americans: Creating Knowledge of a Racial Minority, published by SUNY Press and—in case you want to make her rich—available in the CSUN bookstore under "Asian American Studies 350."
"My first experience with AAS was as an undergrad, listening to fellow students protest for AAS classes and a department, taking UCLA's first experimental class in AAS, and being a respondent on the first large, cross-generational study of Japanese Americans."
Education
Ph.D.
Psychology, University of Colorado, 1979
B.A.
Sociology and Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1973
Scholarship Highlights
National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellowship at the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies.
Asian Americans: Personality patterns, identity, and mental health. New York: Guilford, (1994).
A Postmodern Psychology of Asian Americans: Creating Knowledge of a Racial Minority. NY: SUNY Press, (2002).
CSUN's 2006 Pre-eminent Scholarly Publications Award.