Hideko Sera, PsyD, was presented with this Presidential Citation for her leadership in the psychology education and training community and her longstanding commitment to mentorship, scholarship, and advocacy to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion in higher education.
Sera, associate dean of Student Services for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Morehouse College has a long history of service and advocacy for historically underrepresented students and has led by example to bring about diversity in the psychology field.
Sera was the first Japanese national to receive a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from an APA-accredited program, the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, Illinois. She soon applied her psychological training to higher education across the United States. She served as the associate dean of the University of Redlands School of Education and is recognized for her scholarship and expertise addressing equity, diversity, and inclusion within higher education at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Sera has served the American Psychological Association in many roles. She currently serves on the Board of Educational Affairs, where she was re-elected for a second three-year term. She previously served as a campus training representative as part of the APA’s Psychology Advocacy Network and has advocated for legislation to address increasing student loan burdens, as well as increased federal investments in the graduate psychology education program, which provides stipends to students to train in integrated care settings in underserved communities.
In 2016, Sera was honored by the APA Board of Educational Affairs with the Cynthia D. Belar Education Advocacy Distinguished Service Award for her longstanding commitment to education advocacy and for instilling in her students and colleagues the shared responsibility of advocating for the psychology profession.
As an educator, Sera served as a faculty advisor for a Politics and Advocacy in Clinical Psychology class, where students learned about the importance of being advocates for psychology. She worked with the APA Advocacy staff to present an advocacy training session via teleconference to her students which enabled them to send messages to their Congressional offices to increase support for legislation to reduce graduate student debt.
Sera is a past President of the National Council of Schools and Programs in Professional Psychology, where she organized the mid-winter meeting dedicated to creating mentorship pipelines. She also integrated both grassroots advocacy training and political advocacy to raise funds for Psychology’s Political Action Committee into the program.
Inspired by the Japanese saying “Ichigo-Ichie” (eech-chee-go-eech-yeaopens in new window), that embodies the spirit of the here and now, Sera recently published a chapter in the 2021 Handbook on Research on Leading Higher Education Transformation With Social Justice, Equity, and Inclusion. The concept seeks to reframe racial justice dialogues by focusing on the critical importance of a single encounter to have a transformational impact and to instill a sense of urgency in how we frame racial justice and anti-racism dialogues. The concept is similar to our saying “one in a million” and Sera certainly is that.
Thank you Sera for your commitment and service to APA and the profession of psychology.