A self-described woman of faith, Jessica Henderson Daniel, PhD, ABPP, has led a career of outstanding service and exceptional contributions to educating and mentoring in psychology. Her father, a sought-after Air Force crew chief, and her mother, a community leader and NAACP chapter founder, inspired her lifetime commitment of service to others; a mission she readily accepted and pursued with alacrity.
Born in San Antonio, her childhood followed her father’s deployments to Sacramento, Bermuda, Honolulu, and finally to the Philippines where she completed her first year of college alongside military night-school students. Wanting the experiences of attending a historically Black college, she enrolled at Fayetteville State in North Carolina where she graduated summa cum laude and would later return to receive the Chancellor’s Medallion and deliver a commencement address. She went on to earn her master’s and PhD degrees in psychology at the University of Illinois, picking up a treasured mommy credential along the way.
Recruited in 1973 to Harvard’s Department of Psychiatry at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Judge Baker Children’s Center as a research associate and postdoctoral fellow, she remained at the Hospital and Harvard Medical School for 45 years, rising to the rank of associate professor and training director in psychology and associate training director in the Division of Adolescent Medicine Leadership Education in Adolescent Health program. Harvard Medical School recognized Daniel with its award for Excellence in Mentoring, making her the first woman so honored. She would later receive the Dean’s Faculty Diversity Award for her services as a mentor/advisor to the AHANA (people of African, Hispanic, Asian and Native American descent) students in the psychology programs across all the Harvard teaching hospitals.
Daniel served as member and chair of the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Psychologists, as Trustee at Boston’s Children’s Museum, as a grant reviewer for NIMH, the Office of Child Development, and the Kellogg Foundation. She served as a consultant for the Harvard Law School Negotiation Program, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Black MBA Association, and always as an active member of her church.
As a member of APA and the Association of Black Psychologists for 43 years, she became a fellow of six APA divisions and served as president of two. She served on a score of APA governance groups including the committees on finance, colleague assistance, advancement of professional practice, and early career psychologists. She served on task forces addressing adolescent girls, centering on mentoring, and ethnic minority recruitment, retention and ethics code revision. She was a founding faculty and executive committee member of the Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology and established the National Multicultural Conference Fund at the American Psychological Foundation.
Daniel has received numerous awards including APA’s Heiser Award for advocacy, Award for Distinguished Contributions to Education and Training, and the Kenneth and Mamie Clark Mentoring Award from APAGS. The Society for Psychology of Women retitled its mentoring award to include her name.
Elected to the Council of Representatives (from Massachusetts and Div. 35), Daniel served a term on the Board of Directors and became the first Black woman to become APA president (2018). Still, she would tell you that of all her accomplishments, she most treasures the careers of her mentees—a group of hundreds of scholars and clinicians including six current or recent members of the council and two current candidates for the presidency of APA.